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rHOMAS 

WENTWORTH 

HIGGINSON 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNJTED STATES OF 



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CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS. lamo, $2.00. 

MARGARET FULLER OSSOLl. In the 
American Men of Letters Series. i6mo, 
$1.25. 



EDITED WITH MRS. E. H. BIGELOIV. 

AMERICAN SONNETS. i8mo, $1.25. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
Boston and New York. 



CHEERFUL 
YESTERDAYS 

BY 
THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 



" A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays 
And confident to-morrows." 

Wordsworth, Excursion, Book VII. 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

MDccc xcvm 

3 



2nd COPY, 
1898. 



TWOOOPlEoBEGElVED. 



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V 
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3444 



COPYRIGHT, 1898, 

BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



TO MY WIFE 
MARY THACHER HIGGINSON 

WHOSE SUNNY INFLUENCE ADDS APPROPRIATENESS TO THE 

TITLE, ADOPTED AT HER SUGGESTION, OF THIS BOOK 

OF REMINISCENCES 

Cambridge, Mass., February 12, 1898 



NOTE 

The chapters of this book have appeared at 
short intervals in the " Atlantic Monthly " and 
are here reprinted with careful revision and with 
a few additions. Some of the latter are taken 
from a sketch of the author's mother, published 
originally in the "Ladies' Home Journal," 
These are here included by permission of the 
proprietors of that periodical. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 
I. A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD I 

II. A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 38 

IIL THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS .... 69 

IV. THE REARING OF A REFORMER .... lOO 

V. THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH I32 

VI. THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE .... 167 

VII. KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN I96 

VIIL CIVIL WAR 235 

IX. LITERARY LONDON TWENTY YEARS AGO . . 271 

X. LITERARY PARIS TWENTY YEARS AGO . . 298 

XI. ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE . . . 326 

EPILOGUE 362 

INDEX 365 



CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 

In introducing the imaginary Chronicles of 
P. P., Clerk of this Parish, the poet Pope re- 
marks that any such book might well be in- 
scribed, " On the Importance of a Man to 
Himself." Yet perhaps the first obstacle to be 
encountered by any autobiographer is the sud- 
den sense of his own extreme unimportance. 
Does each ant in an ant-hill yearn to bequeath 
to the universe his personal reminiscences } 
When, at the dead of night, I hear my neigh- 
bors at the Harvard Observatory roll away 
their lofty shutters, in preparation for their 
accustomed tryst with the stars, it seems as 
if one might well be content to keep silence 
in the presence of the Pleiades. Yet, after all, 
the telescope need only be reversed to make 
the universe appear little, and the observer 
large ; so that we may as well begin at the one 
end as at the other. 



2 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

" Man is one world, and hath 
Another to attend him." 

Probably, if the truth were known, nothing in 
the universe is really insignificant, not even 
ourselves. 

When I think of the vast changes which 
every man of my time has seen, of the men 
and women whom I have known, — those who 
created American literature and who freed 
millions of slaves, — men and women whom, 
as the worldly-wise Lord Houghton once wrote 
me, " Europe has learned to honor, and would 
do well to imitate," then I feel that, whether 
I will or no, something worth chronicling may 
be included in the proposed chapters. For the 
rest, the autobiographer has the least reason 
of all writers to concern himself about the 
portrayal of his own personality. He is sure 
to reveal it, particularly if he tries to hide 
it. Confucius asked, " How can a man be 
concealed ?" Of all methods, certainly not by 
writing his reminiscences. He can escape un- 
observed, or else mislead observers, only by 
holding his tongue ; let him open his lips, and 
we have him as he is. 

All the scenes and atmosphere of one's 
native village — if one is fortunate enough to 
have been born in such a locality — lie around 
the memory like the horizon line, unreachable. 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 3 

impassable. Even a so-called cosmopolitan man 
has never seemed to me a very happy being, 
and a cosmopolitan child is above all things to 
be pitied. To be identified in early memories 
with some limited and therefore characteristic 
region, — that is happiness. No child is old 
enough to be a citizen of the world. What 
denationalized Americans hasten to stamp as 
provincial is for children, at least, a saving 
grace. You do not call a nest provincial. All 
this is particularly true of those marked out by 
temperament for a literary career. The pre- 
destined painter or musician needs an early 
contact with the treasures and traditions of an 
older world, but literature needs for its material 
only men, nature, and books ; and of these, the 
first two are everywhere, and the last are easily 
transportable, since you can pile the few su- 
preme authors of the world in a little corner of 
the smallest log cabin. The Cambridge of my 
boyhood — two or three thousand people — 
afforded me, it now seems, all that human heart 
could ask for its elementary training. Those 
who doubt it might, perchance, have been the 
gainers if they had shared it. "He despises 
me," said Ben Jonson, "because I live in an 
alley. Tell him his soul lives in an alley." 

I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 
December 22, 1823, in a house built by my 



4 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

father at the head of what was then called 
Professors' Row, and is now Kirkland Street, 
— the street down which the provincial troops 
marched to the battle of Bunker Hill, after halt- 
ing for prayer at the " gambrel-roofed house " 
where Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was born. 
My father's house — now occupied by Mrs. 
F. L. Batchelder — was begun in 1818, when 
the land was bought from Harvard College, 
whose official he had just become. Already 
the Scientific School and the Hemenway Gym- 
nasium crowd upon it, and the university will 
doubtless, one of these days, engulf it once 
more. My father came of a line of Puritan 
clergymen, officials, militia officers, and latterly 
East India merchants, all dating back to the 
Rev. Francis Higginson, who landed at Salem 
in 1629, in charge of the first large party for 
the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and who made 
that historic farewell recorded by Cotton Ma- 
ther, as his native shores faded away : " We 
will not say, as the Separatists said. Farewell, 
Rome ! Farewell, Babylon ! But we will say. 
Farewell, dear England ! Farewell, the Chris- 
tian church in England, and all the Christian 
friends there ! " 

My father had been, like his father before 
him, — also named Stephen Higginson, and a 
member of the Continental Congress in 1783, 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 5 

— among the leading merchants of Boston, 
until Jefferson's embargo brought a great 
change in his fortunes. He had been unsur- 
passed in those generous philanthropies which 
have given Boston merchants a permanent repu- 
tation ; he was, indeed, frequently mentioned 

— as his cousin, John Lowell, wrote of him — 
as the Howard or the Man of Ross of his 
day, I still possess a fine oil painting of this 
last hero of Pope's lay, a picture sent anony- 
mously to the house, during my father's life, 
with the inscription that it was for a man who 
" so eminently Copys the Fair Original.'- 
Through inquiries very lately made at Ross in 
England, I found with surprise that no picture 
of the original " Man of Ross " remained in 
the village ; and I was led to suspect that this 
might be one of the two portraits which were 
once there, but have disappeared. Mine is 
certainly not that engraved in the " European 
Magazine" for 1786, but a far more attractive 
representation. My father retained warm 
friends in his adversity, who bought for him 
the land where the Cambridge house stood, 
and secured for him the position of steward of 
the college, the post now rechristened " bur- 
sar," and one in which he did, as Dr. A. P. 
Peabody tells us, most of the duties of trea- 
surer. In that capacity he planted, as I have 



6 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

always been told, a large part of the trees in 
the college yard, — nobody in Cambridge ever 
says " campus," — and had also the wisdom to 
hang a lamp over each entrance to the yard, 
although these lamps were soon extinguished 
by the economical college. He was ardently 
interested in the early Unitarian division, then 
pending, in the Congregational body; organ- 
ized the Harvard Divinity School, — not then, 
as now, undenominational ; and seems to have 
been for some years a sort of lay bishop among 
the Unitarian parishes, distributing young min- 
isters to vacant churches without fear or favor. 
He liked to read theology, but was in no 
respect a scholar; indeed. Dr. Peabody says 
that, on receiving for the institution its first 
supply of Hebrew Bibles, my father went to 
the president. Dr. Kirkland, with some indig- 
nation, saying that the books must all be re- 
turned, since the careless printer had put all 
the title-pages at the wrong end. In his adver- 
sity as in his wealth, he was a man of bound- 
less and somewhat impetuous kindness, and 
espoused with such ardor the cause of Miss 
Hannah Adams, the historian, against her rival 
in that profession, the Rev. Dr. Morse, that he 
was betrayed into a share in one or two vehe- 
ment pamphlets, and very nearly into a law- 
suit. 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 7 

He died when I was nine years old, and my 
chief training came consequently from my mo- 
ther and my aunt Miss Anne G. Storrow, then 
known to all the Cambridge world as "Aunt 
Nancy," who was to my mother like a second 
self in the rearing of her children. My mo- 
ther's early life was like a chapter in a romance. 
Captain Thomas Storrow, an English officer, 
being detained a prisoner in Portsmouth dur- 
ing that war, fell in love with a Portsmouth 
maiden, who adventurously married him at the 
age of seventeen, in 1777, and sailed with him 
to England. These were my mother's parents. 
The marriage had all the requisite elements of 
romance — youth, inexperience, two warring 
nations, and two deeply dissatisfied families. 
The bride, Anne Appleton, represented two of 
the best families in the then somewhat aristo- 
cratic province of New Hampshire, the Apple- 
tons and the Wentworths ; the latter, in par- 
ticular, holding their heads so high that they 
were declared by a wicked Portsmouth wit to 
speak habitually of Queen Elizabeth as " Cousin 
Betsy Tudor." This was the nest in which my 
grandmother had been reared. She had lived 
from childhood in the house of her grandfather, 
Judge Wentworth ; her great-grandfather was 
the first of the three royal governors of that 
name, and the two others were her near kins- 



8 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

men. She might, indeed, have sat for the 
heroine of Whittier's ballad, "Amy Went- 
worth; " but it was a soldier, not a sailor, whom 
she married ; and when she went to England — 
fortunately under the proper escort of a kins- 
woman — she was apparently received, both by 
her husband's relatives and her own, with all 
the warmth that might have been expected — 
that is, with none at all. Yet she had sweet 
and winning qualities which finally triumphed 
over all obstacles ; and her married life, though 
full of vicissitudes, was, on the whole, happy. 
They dwelt in England, in Jamaica, in St. 
Andrews, in Campobello, then in Jamaica again. 
Captain Storrow having in the meantime re- 
signed his commission, and having died at sea 
on his passage to Boston, in 1795. My mother, 
Louisa Storrow, had been born, meanwhile, at 
St. Andrews, in 1786. 

Among my mother's most vivid childish re- 
collections was that of being led, a weeping 
child of nine, at the stately funeral of her father, 
who was buried in Boston with military and 
Masonic honors. After his death his young 
widow opened a private school in Hinghara, 
Massachusetts, and through the influence of 
kind friends in Boston, had boarding pupils 
from that city, only twenty miles away, thus 
laying for my mother the foundation of some 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 9 

life-long friendships. This school has been 
praised by Mr. Barnard, the historian of early 
American education, as one of the best of the 
dawning experiments toward the education of 
girls. Mrs. Storrow, however, died within a 
year and a half, and her little family were left 
orphans among strangers or very recent friends. 
Their chief benefactor was my father, into 
whose family my mother was adopted, assist- 
ing in the care of his invalid wife and two little 
girls. Nothing could at the time have been 
less foreseen than the ultimate outcome of this 
arrangement. My mother was betrothed at 
fifteen or sixteen to a young man — Edward 
Cabot — who was lost at sea; a year or two 
later her benefactress, my father's first wife, 
died, and my mother remained in the house- 
hold as an adopted daughter, ultimately becom- 
ing, at the early age of nineteen, my father's 
second wife. 

My father was sixteen years older than my 
mother, and into all his various interests she 
was at once thrown as the young Lady Bounti- 
ful of the household. She also had the care of 
two stepchildren, who all their lives thought of 
her as their mother. My father lived in the 
then fashionable region of Mt. Vernon Street, 
in all the habits of affluence ; his hospitality 
was inconveniently unbounded, and the young 



10 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

wife found herself presiding at large dinner- 
parties and at the sumptuous evening enter- 
tainments, then more in vogue than now. It 
was the recorded verdict of the Hon. George 
Cabot, the social monarch of that day in Bos- 
ton, that "no one received company better 
than Mrs. Higginson," and those who knew 
the unfailing grace and sweetness of her later 
manner can well believe it. She had at this 
time in their freshness certain points of physi- 
cal beauty which she retained unusually unim- 
paired until her latest years — a noble forehead, 
clear blue-gray eyes, a rose-tinted complexion, 
soft brown hair, a pHant figure, with slender 
hands and feet. 

She had, in all, ten children of her own, of 
whom I was the youngest. But before my 
birth the whole scene had suddenly changed. 
My father's whole fortune went when Jeffer- 
son's embargo came ; his numerous vessels were 
captured or valueless. He retired into the 
country, living on a beautiful sheep-farm in 
Bolton, Massachusetts, placed at his disposal 
by a more fortunate friend, Mr. S. V. S, Wilder. 
There lies before me my mother's diary at this 
farm, which begins thus : " On Saturday, the 
8th April, 1815, we left our home, endeared to 
us by a long and happy residence and by the 
society of many dear and kind friends, to make 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD ii 

trial of new scenes, new cares, and new duties ; 
but though by this change we make some sac- 
rifices and have some painful regrets, we are 
still experiencing the same goodness and mercy 
which have hitherto crowned our lives with 
happiness," " I always awake," she adds, 
"calm and serene. My children occupy my 
mind and my heart, and fill it with affection and 
gratitude. They are healthy, innocent, and 
happy, and I enjoy every moment of their 
lives. Books are my recreation, and, next to 
my children, my greatest source of pleasure. 
I read Stewart's ' Philosophical Essays ' and 
the * Faerie Queene ' of Spenser, usually in 
the evening, which is charmingly undisturbed. 
This exemption from visitors is delightful to 
me ; it gives me time to think and to read, and 
I only hope that I shall improve all my advan- 
tages." She was at this time in her thirtieth 
year, and in this sweet spirit laid down the ut- 
most that the little New England capital could 
then afford of luxury and fashion. 

Another change came soon, when she and 
her flock were transferred, rather against her 
will, to Cambridge, and placed in an official 
position. My father's connection with the col- 
lege, and the popular qualities of my mother 
and aunt, brought many guests to our house, 
including the most cultivated men in Boston as 



12 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

well as Ca'mbridge. My earliest documentary 
evidence of existence on this planet is a note to 
my father, in Edward Everett's exquisite hand- 
writing, inquiring after the health of the "babe," 
and saying that Mrs. Everett was putting up 
some tamarinds to accompany the note. The 
precise object of the tamarinds I have never 
clearly understood, but it is pleasant to think 
that I was, at the age of seven months, assisted 
toward maturity by this benefaction from a 
man so eminent. Professor Andrews Norton 
and George Ticknor habitually gave their own 
writings ; and I remember Dr. J. G. Palfrey's 
bringing to the house a new book, Hawthorne's 
"Twice-Told Tales," and reading aloud "A Rill 
from the Town Pump." Once, and once only, 
Washington Irving came there, while visiting 
a nephew who had married my cousin. Mar- 
garet Fuller, a plain, precocious, overgrown girl, 
but already credited with unusual talents, used 
to visit my elder sister, and would sometimes 
sit on a footstool at my mother's feet, gazing 
up at her in admiration. A younger sister of 
Professor Longfellow was a frequent guest, and 
the young poet himself came, in the dawning 
of his yet undeveloped fame. My nurse was 
a certain Rowena Pratt, wife of Dexter Pratt, 
the " Village Blacksmith " of Longfellow ; and 
it is my impression that she was married from 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 13 

our house. It is amusing to remember that 
Professor Longfellow once asked me, many 
years after, what his hero's name was. My 
special playmate, Charles Parsons, was a 
nephew of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who 
was in those years studying in Europe ; and 
in the elder Dr. Holmes's house Charles Par- 
sons and I often " tumbled about in a library," 
— indeed, in the very same library where the 
Autocrat had himself performed the process he 
recommended. Under these circumstances it 
seems very natural that a child thus moulded 
should have drifted into a literary career. 

The period here described was one when 
children were taught to read very early, and 
this in all parts of our country. The celebrated 
General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, in South 
Carolina, was reported by his mother in 1745 
as " beginning to spell before he is two years 
old ; " but he himself said, later, of this preco- 
cious teaching that it was "sad stuff," and 
that " by haste to make him a clever fellow he 
had very nearly become a stupid one," My 
mother made a memorandum in regard to my 
elder sister, "She knows all her letters at 
three," and of me that at four I had already 
"read a good many books." I still preserve 
a penciled note from a little playmate, the 
daughter of a professor, saying, "I am glad 



14 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

you are six years old. I shall be four in 
March," My own daughter could not have 
written that note when she was seven, and yet 
she learned to read and write at that age almost 
without conscious effort. I cannot see that my 
contemporaries either gained or lost anything 
by this precocious instruction ; and perhaps, in 
the total development of a child's mind, the 
actual reading of books plays a much smaller 
part than we imagine. Probably the thing of 
most importance, even with books, as an expe- 
rienced Boston teacher once said, is to have 
been " exposed to them," to have unconsciously 
received their flavor, as a pan of milk takes the 
flavor of surrounding viands. To have lain on 
the hearth-rug and heard one's mother read 
aloud is a liberal education. When I remem- 
ber that my mother actually read to us in the 
evenings every one of the Waverley Novels, 
even down to "Castle Dangerous," I cannot 
but regard with pity the children of to-day who 
have no such privilege. 

My father, in his days of affluence, had 
bought a great many books in London, and 
had them bound under his own eye in the solid 
fashion of that day. Many of them were sold 
in his adversity, yet nearly a thousand volumes 
remained, chiefly of English literature and his- 
tory of the eighteenth century ; and most of 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 15 

these I read. There was a fine set of Dr. 
Johnson's works in a dozen volumes, with an 
early edition of Boswell ; all of Hoole's Tasso 
and Ariosto ; a charming little edition of the 
British essayists, with pretty woodcuts ; Be- 
wick's Birds and Quadrupeds ; Raynal's Indies ; 
the Anti-Jacobin ; Plutarch's Lives ; Dobson's 
Life of Petrarch ; Marshall's and Bancroft's 
Lives of Washington ; Miss Burney's and Miss 
Edgeworth's works ; and " Sir Charles Grandi- 
son." There were many volumes of sermons, 
which my mother was fond of reading, — she 
was, I think, the last person who habitually read 
them,— but which I naturally avoided. There 
were a good many pretty little Italian books, 
belonging to one of my elder sisters, and a stray 
volume of Goethe which had been used by 
another. In out-of-the-way closets I collected 
the disused classical textbooks of my elder 
brothers, and made a little library to be pre- 
served against that magic period when I too 
should be a " collegian." To these were to be 
added many delightful volumes of the later Eng- 
lish poets, Collins, Goldsmith, Byron, Camp- 
bell, and others, given at different times to my 
aunt by George Ticknor. In some of them 
— as in Byron's "Giaour" — he had copied 
additional stanzas, more lately published ; this 
was very fascinating, for it seemed like poetry 



i6 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

in the making. Later, the successive volumes of 
Jared Sparks's historical biographies — Wash- 
ington, Franklin, Morris, Ledyard, and the 
" Library of American Biography " — were all 
the gift of their kindly author, who had often 
brought whole parcels of Washington's and 
Franklin's letters for my mother and aunt to 
look over. A set of Scott's novels was given 
to my elder brother by his life-long crony, John 
Holmes. Besides all this, the family belonged 
to a book club, — the first, I believe, of the 
now innumerable book clubs : of this my eld- 
est brother was secretary, and I was permitted 
to keep, with pride and delight, the account of 
the books as they came and went. Add to 
this my mother's love of reading aloud, and it 
will be seen that there was more danger, for 
a child thus reared, of excess than of scarcity. 
Yet as a matter of fact I never had books 
enough, nor have I ever had to this day. 

Seeing the uniform respect with which my 
mother and aunt and elder sisters were treated 
by the most cultivated men around us, I cannot 
remember to have grown up with the slight- 
est feeling that there was any distinction of sex 
in intellect. Why women did not go to college 
was a point which did not suggest itself; but 
one of my sisters studied German with Pro- 
fessor Charles Follen, while another took les- 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 17 

sons in Latin and Italian from Professor Bachi 
and in geometry from Professor Benjamin 
Peirce. I forget where this especial sister 
studied English, but she wrote for me all the 
passages that were found worth applauding in 
my commencement oration. Yet it is a curious 
fact that I owe indirectly to a single remark 
made by my mother all the opening of my eyes 
to the intellectual disadvantages of her sex. 
There came to Cambridge a very accomplished 
stranger, Mrs. Rufus King, of Cincinnati, Ohio, 
— afterward Mrs. Peter, — who established her- 
self there about 1837, directing the college 
training of a younger brother, two sons, and 
two nephews. No woman in Cambridge was 
so highly educated ; and once, as she was 
making some criticisms at our house upon the 
inequalities between the sexes, my mother ex- 
claimed in her ardent way, "But only think, 
Mrs. King, what an education you have ob- 
tained." "Yes," was the reply, "but how did 
I obtain it ? " Then followed a tale almost as 
pathetic as that told in Mrs. Somerville's auto- 
biography, of her own early struggles for know- 
ledge. I cannot now recall what she said, but 
it sank into my heart, at the age of fifteen or 
thereabouts ; and if I have ever done one thing 
to secure to women better justice in any direc- 
tion, the first impulse came from that fortunate 
question and reply. 



i8 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

More important, however, than all this, to 
my enjoyment, at least, was the musical atmo- 
sphere that pervaded the house. My young- 
est sister was an excellent pianist, — one of 
the first in this region to play Beethoven. 
Among the many students who came to the 
house there were three who played the flute 
well, and they practiced trios with her accompa- 
niment. One of them was John Dwight, after- 
wards editor of the "Journal of Music," and 
long the leading musical critic of Boston ; an- 
other was Christopher Pearse Cranch, poet and 
artist ; and the third was William Habersham 
from Savannah, who had a silver flute, of which 
I remember John Dwight's saying, when it first 
made its appearance, " It has a silver sound." 
When I read in later years the experiences of 
the music-loving boy in "Charles Auchester," 
it brought back vividly the happiness with 
which, when sent to bed at eight o'clock, I used 
to leave the door of my little bedroom ajar, in 
order that I might go to sleep to music. 

Greater still were the joy and triumph when 
Miss Helen Davis, who was the musical queen 
of our Cambridge world, came and filled the 
house with her magnificent voice, singing in the 
dramatic style then in vogue the highly senti- 
mental songs that rent my childish heart with a 
touch of romance that happily has never faded 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 19 

away : " The Breaking Waves Dashed High," 
"The Outward Bound," "Love Not," "Fairy 
Bells," " The Evening Gun," and dozens of 
others, the slightest strain of which brings back 
to me, after sixty years, every thrill of her voice, 
every movement of her fine head. Strange 
power of music, strange gift to be bestowed on 
one who, when once away from the piano, was 
simply a hearty, good-natured woman, without a 
trace of inspiration! She was the sister of Lieu- 
tenant (afterwards Admiral) Davis, and his fine 
naval achievements at Port Royal and Memphis 
seemed only to put into " squadron-strophes " 
the magnificent triumphs of her song. I still 
recall the enchantment with which I heard, one 
moonlit summer night, the fine old glee " To 
Greece we give our Shining Blades," sung as 
a serenade under my sister's window, by a quar- 
tette consisting of Miss Davis and her brother, 
of Miss Harriet Mills, who afterwards became 
his wife, and of William Story. I had never 
before heard the song, and it made me feel, in 
Keats' s phrase, as if I were going to a tour- 
nament. 

I went to a woman's school till I was eight ; 
then walked daily, for five years, from the age 
of eight to that of thirteen, to the private 
school of William Wells, an institution which 
was then regarded as being — with the possible 



20 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

exception of the Boston Latin School — the 
best place in which to fit for Harvard Col- 
lege, .and which was therefore much sought by 
the best Boston families. Mr. Wells was an 
Englishman of the old stamp, erect, vigorous, 
manly, who abhorred a mean or cowardly boy 
as he did a false quantity. The school was a 
survival of a type which still lingers, I fancy, in 
the British provinces, — honest and genuine, 
mainly physical in its discipline, and somewhat 
brutal as to its boyish life and ways. Being a 
day-scholar only, I escaped something of the 
coarseness and actual demoralization which ex- 
isted there ; and thanks to an elder brother, 
the strongest boy in the school, I went free of 
the frequent pommeling visited by the larger 
boys on the smaller. I will not go so far as 
my schoolmate, the late Charles C. Perkins, 
who used simply to say of it, when questioned 
by his young sons, " My dears, it was hell ; " 
but even as a day-scholar I recall some aspects 
of it with hearty dislike, and am glad that it 
was my happy lot to have come no nearer. 
The evil was, however, tempered by a great 
deal of wholesome athletic activity, which Mr. 
Wells encouraged : there was perpetual playing 
of ball and of fascinating running games ; and 
we were very likely to have an extra half-holi- 
day when skating or coasting was good. 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 21 

There was no real cruelty in the discipline of 
the school, — though I have sometimes seen 
this attributed to it, as in Adams's " Life of 
Richard Dana," — but Mr. Wells carried always 
a rattan in his hand, and it descended frequently 
on back and arm. Being very fond of study and 
learning easily, I usually escaped the rod ; but 
I can see now that its very presence was some- 
what degrading to boyish nature, Mr. Wells 
taught us absolutely nothing but Latin and 
Greek, yet these he inculcated most faithfully, 
and I have heretofore described, in an essay 
"On an Old Latin Text Book," the joy I took 
in them. I well remember that on first being 
promoted to translating English into Greek, I 
wrote on and on, purely for pleasure, doing the 
exercises for days in advance. I should add 
that he taught us to write from copies set by 
himself in a clear and beautiful handwriting, 
and that we were supposed to learn something 
of history by simply reading aloud in class from 
Russell's " Modern Europe ; " this being, after 
all, not so bad a way. It must not be forgotten 
that he bestowed a positive boon upon us by 
producing a Latin grammar of his own, so brief 
and simple that when I was afterwards called 
upon to administer to pupils the terrible manual 
of Andrews and Stoddard, it seemed to me, as 
indeed it has always since seemed, a burden 



22 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

too intolerable to be borne. French was taught 
by his eldest daughter, an excellent woman, 
though she sometimes had a way of tapping 
little boys on the head with her thimble ; and 
mathematics we received from a succession of 
Harvard students, thimbleless. For a time, 
one fair girl, Mary Story — William Story's sis- 
ter, and afterwards Mrs. George Ticknor Curtis 
— glided in to her desk in the corner, that 
she might recite Virgil with the older class. 

But in general the ill effect of a purely mas- 
culine world was very manifest in the school, 
and my lifelong preference for co-education 
was largely based upon what I saw there. I 
could not help noticing — and indeed observed 
the same thing in another boarding-school, 
where I taught at a later day — the greater re- 
finement, and I may say civilization, of the day- 
scholars, who played with their sisters at home, 
as compared with those little exiles who had no 
such natural companionship. I must not for- 
get one almost romantic aspect of the school 
in the occasional advent of Spanish boys, usually 
from Porto Rico, who were as good as dime 
novels to us, with their dark skins and sonorous 
names, — Victoriano Rosello, Magin Rigual, Pe- 
dro Mangual. They swore superb Spanish oaths, 
which we naturally borrowed ; and they once 
or twice drew knives upon one another, with 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 23 

an air which the " Pirates' Own Book " offered 
nothing to surpass. Nor must I forget that 
there were also in the school certain traditions, 
superstitions, even mechanical contrivances, 
which were not known in the world outside. 
There were mechanisms of pulleys for keeping 
the desk-lid raised ; the boys made for them- 
selves little two-wheeled trucks to ride upon, 
and every seat in the school was perforated 
with two small holes for needles, to be worked 
by a pulley, for the sudden impaling of a fel- 
low student, or even of the mathematical usher. 
Enormous myths existed as to what had been 
done, in the way of rebellion, by the pupils of a 
previous generation ; and the initials of older 
students still remained carved in vast confusion 
on the end of the woodshed, like the wall which 
commemorates Canning and Byron at Harrow. 
Above all, a literature circulated under the 
desks, to be read surreptitiously, — such books 
as those to which Emerson records his grati- 
tude at the Latin School ; fortunately nothing 
pernicious, yet much that was exciting, includ- 
ing little dingy volumes of " Baron Trenck," 
and " Rinaldo Rinaldini," and " The Three 
Spaniards," and "The Devil on Two Sticks." 
Can these be now found at any bookstore, I 
wonder, or have the boys of the present gen- 
eration ever heard of them ? 



24 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

But the most important portion of a boy's 
life is perhaps his outdoor training, since to live 
out of doors is to be forever in some respects 
a boy. " Who could be before me, though the 
palace of the Caesars crackt and split with em- 
perors, while I, sitting in silence on a cliff of 
Rhodes, watcht the sun as he swang his golden 
censer athwart the heavens ? " Landor's hero 
was not happier than my playmate, Charles 
Parsons, and myself, as we lay under Lowell's 
willows "at the causey's end," after a day at 
Mount Auburn, — then Sweet Auburn still, — 
to sort out our butterflies in summer or divide 
our walnuts in autumn, while we chanted uproar- 
iously the " Hunter's Chorus : " — 

" We roam through the forest and over the mountain ; 
No joy of the court or banquet like this." 

We always made a pause after the word " court," 
and supposed ourselves to be hurling defiance 
at monarchies. 

Every boy of active tastes — and mine were 
eminently such — must become the one thing 
or the other, either a sportsman or a naturalist ; 
and I have never regretted that it was my lot to 
become the latter. My fellow townsman. Dr. 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, describes himself as 
wandering along our native stream " with reek- 
ing sandal and superfluous gun." My sandals 
suffered, also, but I went with butterfly-net and 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 25 

tin botanical box. Perhaps these preoccupied 
me before I yearned after field-sports, or per- 
haps there was no real yearning. I can remem- 
ber that as a child I sometimes accompanied an 
elder brother or cousin to pick up the birds he 
shot, though he rarely seemed to shoot any ; 
but there occurred an event which, slight as it 
was, damped all longing to emulate him. Com- 
ing down what is now Divinity Avenue with an 
older boy, George Ware, who rejoiced in a bow 
and arrow, we stopped under the mulberry-tree 
which still stands at the entrance of the street, 
and he aimed at a beautiful crested cedar-bird 
which was feeding on the mulberries. By some 
extraordinary chance he hit it, and down came 
the pretty creature, fluttering and struggling 
in the air, with the cruel arrow through its 
breast. I do not know whether the actual 
sportsman suffered pangs of remorse, but I 
know that I did, and feel them yet. After- 
wards I read with full sympathy Bettine Bren- 
tano's thoughts about the dead bird: "God 
gives him wings, and I shoot him down ; that 
chimes not in tune." I later learned from Tho- 
reau to study birds through an opera-glass. 

It may appear strange that with this feeling 
about birds I seemed to have no such vivid 
feeling about fishes or insects. Perhaps it was 
because they are so much farther from the 



26 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

human, and touch the imagination less. I 
could then fish all day by the seashore and could 
collect insects without hesitation, — always be- 
ing self-limited in the latter case to two speci- 
mens of each species. Since the Civil War, how- 
ever, I find that I can do neither of these things 
without compunction, and was pleased to hear 
from that eminent officer and thoroughly manly 
man, General Francis A. Walker, that the war 
had a similar effect on him. "Dulce bellum 
inexpertis." It has been a source of happiness 
for life to have acquired such early personal 
acquaintance with the numberless little people 
of the woods and mountains. Every spring 
they come out to meet me, each a familiar 
friend, unchanged in a world where all else 
changes ; and several times in a year I dream 
by night of some realm gorgeous with gayly 
tinted beetles and lustrous butterflies. Wild 
flowers, also, have been a lasting delight, though 
these are a little less fascinating than insects, 
as belonging to a duller life. Yet I associate 
with each ravaged tract in my native town the 
place where vanished flowers once grew, — the 
cardinal flowers and gentians in the meadows, 
the gay rhexia by the woodside, and the tall 
hibiscus by the river. 

Being large and tolerably strong, I loved all 
kinds of athletic exercises, and learned to swim 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 27 

in the river near where Professor Horsford's 
active imagination has established the " Lief's 
booths " of the Norse legends. There have 
been few moments in life which ever gave a 
sense of conquest and achievement so delicious 
as when I first clearly made my way through 
water beyond my depth, from one sedgy bank 
to another. Skating was learned on Craigie's 
Pond, now drained, and afterwards practiced 
on the beautiful black ice of Fresh Pond. We 
played baseball and football, and a modified 
cricket, and on Saturdays made our way to the 
tenpin alleys at Fresh Pond or Porter's Tavern. 
My father had an old white pony which pa- 
tiently ambled under me, and I was occasionally 
allowed to borrow Dr. Webster's donkey, the 
only donkey I had ever seen. Sometimes we 
were taken to Nahant for a day by the seaside, 
and watched there the swallows actually building 
their nests in Swallows' Cave, whence they have 
long since vanished. Perhaps we drove down 
over the interminable beach, but we oftener 
went in the steamboat ; and my very earliest 
definite recollection is that of being afraid to 
go down into the cabin for dinner because a 
black waiter — the first I ever saw — had just 
gone down, and I was afraid. Considering how 
deeply I was to cast in my lot with the black 
race in later years, it seems curious that the 



28 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

acquaintance should have begun with this un- 
substantial and misplaced alarm. Probably the 
fact was fixed firmly in memory by the result- 
ing hunger. 

It was a great advantage for outdoor training 
that my school was a mile off, and I paced the 
distance to and fro, twice a day, through what 
was then a rural region interspersed with a 
few large houses of historical associations. The 
great colonial residences on Tory Row, of which 
Craigie House was only one, always impressed 
the imagination. Sometimes I had companions, 
— my elder brother for a time, and his class- 
mates, Lowell and Story. I remember tread- 
ing along close behind them once, as they dis- 
cussed Spenser's "Faerie Oueene," which they 
had been reading, and which led us younger 
boys to christen a favorite play-place " the 
Bower of Blisse." Story was then a conspicu- 
ously handsome boy, with a rather high-bred 
look, and overflowing with fun and frolic, as 
indeed he was during his whole life. Lowell 
was at that time of much more ordinary ap- 
pearance, short and freckled, and a secondary 
figure beside Story ; yet in later life, with his 
fine eyes and Apollo -like brow, he became 
much the more noticeable of the two, as he 
was certainly far superior in genius. 

Oftener I went alone. Sometimes I made 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 29 

up stories as I went, usually magnifying little 
incidents or observations of my own into some 
prolonged tale with a fine name, having an im- 
aginary hero. For a long time his name was 
D'Arlon, from the person of that name in 
Taylor's "Philip van Artevelde," which my 
mother was reading to us. In these imagin- 
ings all the small wrongs and failures of my 
life were retrieved. D'Arlon went through 
the same incidents with myself, but uniformly 
succeeded where I had failed, and came out of 
the crisis with the unerring certainty of one of 
Stanley Weyman's heroes. One of my chief 
playmates, Thornton Ware, a handsome boy 
with curly black hair, the admiration of all 
little girls, might easily distance me in their 
regard, but had no chance whatever against 
the imaginary D'Arlon. At other times I had 
no material for a story, but watched the robins, 
the bluebirds, and above all the insects, acquir- 
ing an eagle eye for a far-off moth or beetle on 
fence or wall. I remember that at the corner 
where Craigie Street now turns off from Brattle 
Street, there was a clump of milkweed, where 
every day there was some new variety of spot- 
ted ladybird {coccinella or chrysomeld) ; and I 
remember pondering, as I compared them, with 
pre-Darwinian wonder, whether they were all 
created from the beginning as separate species. 



30 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

or were somehow developed from one another. 
On other days I played a game of football a 
mile long, trying to kick before me some par- 
ticular stone or horse-chestnut for the whole 
distance from the school door to my own 
gate; sometimes betting heavily with myself, 
and perhaps losing manfully, like Dick Swiv- 
eller at his solitary cribbage. Then in winter 
there was always the hope of "punging," get- 
ting a ride on the runners of a sleigh, or hitch- 
ing my sled behind some vehicle ; and in spring 
that of riding with the driver of an empty 
ice-cart or walking beside a full one, and watch- 
ing the fine horses that then, in endless pro- 
cession, drew heavy wagons bearing the winter 
harvest of Fresh Pond to be shipped to distant 
lands. 

My most immediate playmate was the next- 
door neighbor, already mentioned, who in later 
life was a medical professor in Brown Univer- 
sity. He was a prim, grave little boy, and was 
called " old-fashioned ; " he was very preco- 
cious, and though only three months older than 
myself was a year before me in college, graduat- 
ing at just seventeen, — each of us being the 
youngest in our respective classes. There was 
between our houses only the field now occupied 
by the Hemenway Gymnasium and the Scien- 
tific School; and while we were not school- 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 31 

mates, we were almost constantly together out 
of school hours. Many an hour we spent por- 
ing over the pictures in the large old Rees' Cy- 
clopaedia ; afterwards, when weary, piling up the 
big volumes for fortifications, to be mutually 
assailed by cannonading apples from a perpetual 
barrel in the closet. Meanwhile, the kindly 
old grandfather, working away at his sermons 
or his "American Annals," never seemed dis- 
turbed by our romping ; and I remember viv- 
idly one winter evening, when he went to the 
window, and, scratching with his knife-blade 
through the thick frost, shaped the outlines of 
rough brambles below, and made a constella- 
tion of stars above, with the added motto, " Per 
aspera ad astra," — then explaining to us its 
meaning, that through difficulties we must seek 
the stars. 

It is a mistake to suppose that we did not 
have, sixty years ago in New England, associa- 
tions already historic. At home we had vari- 
ous family portraits of ancestors in tie-wigs or 
powdered hair. We knew the very treasures 
which Dr. Holmes describes as gathered in his 
attic, and never were tired of exploring old 
cupboards and hunting up traditions. We de- 
lighted to pore over the old fiat tombstones in 
the Old Cambridge cemetery, stones with long 
Latin inscriptions, on which even the language 



32 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

is dead, celebrating virtues ending in issimus 
and errimus. The most impressive of all was 
the Vassall monument, raised on pillars above 
the rest, and bearing no words, only the carved 
goblet and sun (Vas - sol), — the monument 
beneath which lie, according to tradition, the 
bodies of two slaves : — 

" At her feet and at her head 
Lies a slave to attend the dead, 
But their dust is white as hers." 

This poem was not yet written, but Holmes's 
verses on this churchyard were familiar on our 
lips, and we sighed with him over his sister's 
grave, and over the stone where the French 
exile from Honfleur was buried and his epitaph 
was carved in French. Moreover, the "ever- 
roaming girls " whom Holmes exhorted to bend 
over the wall and " sweep the simple lines " 
with the floating curls then fashionable, — these 
were our own neighbors and sweethearts, and it 
all seemed in the last degree poetic and charm- 
ing. More suggestive than all these were the 
eloquent fissures in the flat stones where the 
leaden coats of arms had been pried out to be 
melted into bullets for the Continental army. 
And it all so linked us with the past that when, 
years after, I stood outside the Temple Church 
in London, and, looking casually down, saw be- 
neath my feet the name of Oliver Goldsmith, 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 33 

it really gave no more sense of a dignified his- 
toric past than those stones at my birthplace. 
Nor did it actually carry me back so far in 
time. 

In the same way, our walks, when not di- 
rected toward certain localities for rare flow- 
ers or birds or insects, — as to Mount Auburn 
sands, now included in the cemetery of that 
name, or the extensive jungle north of Fresh 
Pond, where the herons of Longfellow's poem 
had their nests, — were more or less guided 
by historic objects. There was the pictur- 
esque old Revolutionary Powder Mill in what 
is now Somerville, or the remains of redoubts 
on Winter Hill, where we used to lie along 
the grassy slopes and repel many British on- 
slaughts. Often we went to the fascinating 
wharves of Boston, then twice as long as now, 
and full of sea-smells and crossed yards and 
earringed sailors. A neighbor's boy had the 
distinction of being bad enough to be actually 
sent to sea for a dubious reformation ; and 
though, when he came back, I was forbidden 
to play with him, on the ground that he not 
only swore, but carried an alleged pistol, yet it 
was something to live on the same street with 
one so marked out from the list of common 
boys, and to watch him from afar exhibiting to 
youths of laxer training what seemed to be the 



34 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

weapon. I may here add that the only other 
child with whom I was forbidden to play be- 
came in later life an eminent clergyman. 

Once we undertook to go as far as Bunker 
Hill, and were ignominiously turned back by 
a party of Charlestown boys, — " Chariest own 
pigs," as they were then usually and affec- 
tionately called, — who charged us with being 
"Port chucks" (that is, from Cambridgeport) 
or " Pointers " (that is, from Lechmere Point, 
or East Cambridge), and ended with the mild 
torture of taking away our canes. Or we 
would visit the ruins of the Ursuline Convent, 
whose flames I had seen from our front door in 
Cambridge, standing by my mother's side ; all 
that I had read of persecutions not implanting 
so lasting a love of liberty as that one spectacle. 
I stood by her also the day after, when she 
went out to take the gauge of public opinion 
in consultation with the family butcher, Mr. 
Houghton ; and I saw her checkmated by his 
leisurely retort, "Wal, I dunno, Mis' Higgin- 
son ; I guess them biships are pretty dissipated 
characters." The interest was enhanced by 
the fact that a youthful Cambridge neighbor, 
Maria Fay, was a pupil in the school at the 
time, and was held up by the terrified precep- 
tress to say to the rioters, "My father is a 
judge, and if you don't go away he will put you 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 35 

all in jail." The effect of the threat may have 
been somewhat impaired by the fact that her 
parent was but a peaceful judge of probate, and 
could only have wreaked his vengeance on their 
last wills and testaments. At any rate, there 
stood the blackened walls for many years, until 
the bricks were used in building the inside 
walls of the cathedral towers in Boston ; and 
there was no other trace of the affray, except 
the inscription " Hell to the Pope," scrawled 
in charcoal on a bit of lingering plaster. We 
gazed at it with awe, as if it were a memorial 
of Bloody Mary — with a difference. 

Greatly to my bliss, I escaped almost abso- 
lutely all those rigors of the old New England 
theology which have darkened the lives of so 
many. I never heard of the Five Points of 
Calvinism until maturity ; never was converted, 
never experienced religion. We were expected 
to read the New Testament, but there was 
nothing enforced about the Old, and we were 
as fortunate as a little girl I have since known, 
who was sure that there could be no such place 
as hell, because their minister had never men- 
tioned it. Even Sunday brought no actual 
terrors. I have the sweetest image of my 
mother sitting ready dressed for church, before 
my sisters had descended, and usually bearing 
a flower in her hand. In winter we commonly 



36 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

drove to the parish church in an open sleigh, 
and once had an epoch-making capsize into a 
snowdrift. As I was seized by the legs and 
drawn forth, I felt like the hero of one of the 
Waverley novels, and as if I had been in Rob 
Roy's cave. No doubt we observed the Sab- 
bath after a mild fashion, for I once played a 
surreptitious game of ball with my brother 
behind the barn on that day, and it could not 
have made me so very happy had it not been, 
as Emerson says, "drugged with the relish of 
fear and pain." Yet I now recall with pleasure 
that while my mother disapproved of all but 
sacred music on Sunday, she ruled that all good 
music was sacred ; and that she let us play on 
Sunday evening a refreshing game of cards, — 
geographical cards, — from which we learned 
that the capital of Dahomey was Abomey. 
Compared with the fate of many contempo- 
raries, what soothing and harmless chains were 
these ! 

In all these early recollections there has been 
small mention of the other sex, and yet that 
sweet entity was to me, and in fact to all of 
us boys, a matter of most momentous import- 
ance. We were all, it now seems to me, a set of 
desperate little lovers, with formidable rivalries, 
suspicions, and jealousies ; and we had names 
of our own devising for each juvenile maiden. 



A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 37 

by which she could be mentioned without peril 
of discovery. One of the older boys, being of 
a peculiarly inventive turn, got up a long and 
imaginary wooing of a black-eyed damsel who 
went to school in Cambridge, He showed us 
letters and poems, and communicated all the 
ups and downs of varying emotion. They were 
finally separated, amid mutual despair, and I do 
not suppose that she had ever known him by 
sight. We had our share of dancing-schools, 
always in private houses, taught sometimes by 
the elder Papanti, and sometimes by a most 
graceful woman, Miss Margaret Davis, sister of 
the songstress I have described. We had May- 
day parties, usually at Mount Auburn, and 
showed in the chilly May mornings that heroic 
courage which Lowell plaintively attributes to 
children on these occasions. But all this sport- 
ing with Amaryllis soon became secondary for 
us, being Cambridge boys, to the great realm 
of academical life, to which no girls might then 
aspire. That vast mysterious region lies always 
before the boy who is bred in a college town, 
alluring, exciting, threatening, as the sea lies 
before the sailor's son. One by one he sees 
his elder playmates glide away upon it, until at 
last his turn comes ; and before I was fourteen. 
I myself was launched. 



II 

A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 

I COME back to Cambridge every autumn, 
when the leaves are falling from the trees, and 
the old university, like the weird witch-hazel 
in the groves, puts out fresh blossoms at the 
season when all else grows sere. It is a never 
failing delight to behold the hundreds of new- 
comers who then throng our streets : boys with 
smooth and unworn faces, full of the zest of 
their own being, taking the whole world as 
having been made for them, which indeed it 
was; — willing to do any needful kindness to 
an elder human being, as in rescuing him from 
carriage-wheels or picking him out of the mud, 
but otherwise as wholesomely indifferent to his 
very existence as if he were a lamp-post or a 
horseless vehicle. If he be wise, he joyfully ac- 
cepts the situation, and takes in it something of 
the pride which a father feels when his young- 
est son overtops him by a head. Instead of 
grudging to the new-comers this empire of the 
immediate future, I feel always impelled to wel- 
come them to it ; in behalf of the human race, 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 39 

I rejoice to see its vigor so lustily maintained; 
the visible self-confidence is well founded, and 
has the facts on its side. The future is theirs 
to command, not ours ; it belongs to them even 
more than they think it does, and this is un- 
doubtedly saying a good deal. 

This ready self-subordination to these kings 
of to-morrow may come, in my own case, from 
the fact that I am, more than any one else 
now living in Cambridge, except perhaps John 
Holmes and Professor Norton, a child of the 
college; and the latter is my junior, and was 
once in my eyes one of these very boys. All 
three of us were, so to speak, born in the col- 
lege, bred to it, and interested from earliest 
recollection in its men. Never having been 
or having wished to be one of its officials, I 
look upon its annual harvest of youthful life 
with all the more dispassionate interest. Liv- 
ing in a college town is, after all, very much 
like dwelling just outside of a remarkably large 
glass beehive, where one can watch all day 
long the busy little people inside ; can see 
them going incessantly to and fro at their 
honey-making, pausing occasionally to salute 
or sting one another — and all without the 
slightest peril to the beholder. Life becomes 
rich in this safe and curious contemplation, and 
this is a pursuit which every boy in a college 



40 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

town begins very early. It was thus that 
Charles Parsons and I, from the time we were 
allowed to go alone in the street, studied the 
little academical world on whose edge we dwelt. 

At ten years of age, it is certain, we could 
repeat the list of every undergraduate class 
alphabetically, and prided ourselves on knowing 
every student by sight. This was not so in- 
credible as it would now seem, for the classes 
rarely had more than fifty each, the whole 
college counting little more than half as many 
as a single class now numbers. All these 
young fellows we not merely knew by sight, but 
studied individually, — their nicknames, their 
games, their individual haunts ; — we watched 
them at football or cricket ; had our favorites 
and our aversions ; waited anxiously for the 
time when, once or twice a year, the professor 
of chemistry gave many of them " exhilarat- 
ing gas," as it was called, on the triangle then 
known as the Delta, and they gesticulated, 
made speeches, or recited poetry, as uncon- 
scious of their self - revelation as an autobi- 
ographer. 

Sometimes in summer evenings — for the 
college term then lasted until the middle of 
July — we would amuse ourselves by selecting 
in the street some single student, and trailing 
him from place to place, like the Indians of 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 41 

whom we had read in Cooper's novels ; follow- 
ing wherever he went, watching, waiting, often 
losing and then finding him again, and perhaps 
delaying our own early bedtime that we might 
see him through some prolonged evening call, 
though he was all unconscious of our watch- 
ful care. I can still breathe the aroma of the 
lilac-bushes among which we ensconced our- 
selves, and can catch a glimpse of the maiden 
who possibly appeared at the door to bid him 
a demure good -night. On other days there 
was the Harvard Washington Corps, or college 
military company, to be watched at its drill on 
the common, or on its proud march to the sub- 
urban tavern where it dined, — Porter's, at what 
is now North Cambridge, — and on its some- 
times devious return. O ecstasy of childish 
love for costume and rhythm and glory ! In 
later life I have ridden at the head of a thou- 
sand marching men, and felt no such sense of 
exaltation above the low earth as when I first 
saw my favorite elder brother, in the prescribed 
white trousers and black coat, with epaulets 
and befrogged sleeves, parading as second lieu- 
tenant before one of the swaying platoons of 
the " College Company." 

With all this precocious interest in the 
students, it is needless to say that I awaited 
with absorbing eagerness the time when I 



42 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

should enter that great little world into which 
"my immediate playmate had preceded me ; and 
that it was a blissful moment when I at last 
found myself, one autumn morning, admitted 
on examination, without conditions, and stand- 
ing on the steps of University Hall, looking 
about with a new sense of ownership on the 
trees my father had planted. I was not yet 
fourteen, and was the youngest in my class ; 
but never since in life have I had such a vivid 
sense of a career, an opportunity, a battle to 
be won. This is what gilds the memory of 
college life : that we dwelt there like Goethe's 
fairy Melusina or the heroine of O'Brien's "Dia- 
mond Lens," in a real but miniature world, a 
microcosm of the visible universe. It seems to 
me that I never have encountered a type of 
character in the greater world which was not 
represented more or less among my classmates, 
or dealt with any thought or principle which 
was not discussed in elementary form in our 
evening walks up Brattle Street. 

Harvard College was then a comparatively 
small affair, as was the village in which it 
existed ; but both had their day of glory, which 
was Commencement Day, now a merely aca- 
demic ceremonial, but then a public festival for 
eastern Massachusetts. It has been so well 
described by both Lowell and John Holmes 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 43 

that I will not dwell upon it in detail. The 
streets were filled with people, arriving from 
far and near ; there were booths, fairs, horse- 
races, encampments of alleged gamblers in out- 
lying groves. Perhaps the most striking single 
illustrations of the day's importance lay in the 
fact that the banks in Boston were closed on 
that day, and that Boston gentlemen, even if not 
graduates of the college, often came to Cam- 
bridge for a day or two, at that time, taking 
rooms and receiving their friends. My grand- 
father, Stephen Higginson, used to come over 
from Brookline, take quarters in this way at 
Porter's tavern (the Boylston Street Porter), 
and keep open house, with probable punch- 
bowl. The practice had ceased before the 
period of my recollection, but my cousin, the 
Rev. William Henry Channing, has vividly de- 
scribed the way in which my grandfather must 
have set out on these expeditions. ^ 

1 " Owing doubtless to the fact that, following the univer- 
sal fashion of gentlemen of his position in that period, he 
wore his gray hair powdered, he was to me the type of all 
that was most ancient and venerable. His imposing figure, 
air, and manner filled me with ever new admiration, as, 
clothed in entire black, with his snowy locks and queue, and 
his ruffled wristbands and shirt bosom, white cravat above, 
and tightly buttoned gaiters or buckled shoes below, with 
broad brimmed hat and gold-headed cane, he descended the 
doorsteps to enter his carriage. This carriage, one of the 
large, brightly ornamented, highly polished style then in 



44 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

For the rest of the year Cambridge relapsed 
into a kind of privacy, except that three days 
of " Exhibition " — a sort of minor Commence- 
ment, with public exercises — were distributed 
through the terms, and brought together many 
strangers. At ordinary times the external status 
of the college was more like that of some coun- 
try academy than that of an embryo university. 
There were but seven buildings inside the col- 
lege yard, and but one outside. There are now 
about 3000 students, of various grades and de- 
partments, registered in Cambridge; in 1837, 
when I entered college, there were but 305 
such students ; and in 1841, when I graduated, 
but 366. In like manner, Cambridge is now 
a city of some 85,000 inhabitants, whereas in 
1840 it had but 8409, distributed among three 
villages, of which Old Cambridge, grouped 
round the college buildings, had less than half, 

vogue, with a lofty cushioned box-seat for the coachman and 
platform behind for the footman, had been built in England, 
whence my grandfather had lately returned, and was, I pre- 
sume, of very much the same pattern as thousands which are 
seen every day in all European and American cities. But 
it affected my imagination then as a princely equipage. So, 
as all boys are wont to fancy, my grandfather appeared to 
me the peer of the noblest. And still more stately and ele- 
gant was he to my imagination when attired in full costume 
to receive his guests at dinner or evening parties in his own 
house." — Memoir of William Henry Charming, by O. B. 
Frothingham, p. 9. 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 45 

Yet, after all, these figures make little differ- 
ence to the boy ; a crowd is a crowd, whether 
it be counted by hundreds or thousands, since 
you see at the most only those immediately 
pressing round you. For us, I repeat, the col- 
lege was a world ; whether larger or smaller on 
the outskirts was of secondary importance. 

It is mistakenly assumed by clergymen and 
editors that this little community, in its village 
days, was necessarily more virtuous, or at least 
more decorous, than now. The fact is all the 
other way ; for the early drinking habits of soci- 
ety still flourished, and the modern temperance 
agitation was but beginning. When Allston, 
the painter, kept the records of the Hasty 
Pudding Club, in rhyme, he thus described 
the close of the annual dinner of that frugal 
body : — 

" And each one to evince his spunk 
Vied with his neighbor to get drunk ; 
Nor tedious was the mighty strife 
With these true-blooded blades of life, 
For less than hours two had gone 
When roaring mad was every one." 

Allston left college in 1 800, forty years before 
my day ; yet it was in my own time that the 
Rev. Dr. John Pierce recorded in his Diary 
that he had seen men intoxicated at $ B K 
dinners — this society being composed only of 
the best scholars in each class — who were 



46 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

never seen in this condition at any other time. 
We boys used to watch the Harvard Washing- 
ton Corps on its return from the dinner at 
Porter's, quite secure that some of our acquaint- 
ances would stagger out of the ranks and find 
lodgment in the gutter. The regular Class 
Day celebration was for the seniors to gather 
under Liberty Tree and serve out buckets of 
punch to all comers. Robbing hen-roosts was 
common enough, and youths of good standing in 
my own class would organize marauding expedi- 
tions, with large baskets, to bring back pears 
and melons from the market gardens in what 
is now Belmont. These thefts hurt no one's 
reputation at that day, whereas now to be 
suspected of them would dethrone the most 
popular man : he would be voted a " cad " or a 
" mucker ; " he would be dropped from his 
clubs. As for the drinking habit, I have no 
statistics to offer, but an intoxicated student is 
the rarest possible sight in the streets of Cam- 
bridge. This may not involve a clear gain in 
morality, but the improvement in gentlemanli- 
ness is enormous. 

The college of that period has been some- 
times described as drawing its members from 
a smaller geographical range than at present. 
This was of course true in a general way, yet 
in one respect the precise contrary was the 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 47 

case. In that ante-bellum period, the Southern 
students were a noticeable element in the col- 
lege, and a very conspicuous one in the Law 
School, being drawn thereto by the great repu- 
tation of Judge Story; and as these youths 
were all reared under the influence of slavery, 
they contributed a far more distinctive element 
in Cambridge society than anything now to 
be seen there. The difference between the 
richest student from New York or California 
and the very poorest and most abstemious boy 
from some New England farm is not nearly so 
marked as that which then distinguished the 
demeanor of the average Southern from the 
average New England student. As a rule, 
the Southerners were clearly the favorites in 
Cambridge society : they usually had charming 
manners, social aptitudes, imperious ways, abun- 
dant leisure, and plenty of money ; they were 
graceful dancers, often musical, and sometimes 
well taught. On the other " hand, they were 
often indolent, profligate, and quarrelsome ; and 
they were almost wholly responsible for the 
" town and gown " quarrels, now extinct, but 
then not infrequent. Contributing sometimes 
the most brilliant young men to the Law School, 
they furnished also a number who, having been 
brought up on remote plantations and much 
indulged, had remained grossly ignorant. I 



48 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

remember one in particular who was supposed 
to have entered the Law School, but who 
proved to be taking private lessons in some- 
thing from Charles Devens, afterwards judge 
and major-general. A mystery hung about 
the matter till it was found that the youth, 
who was as showy as any of his companions in 
dress and bearing, was simply learning to read 
and write. 

Let us now turn back to the condition of 
intellectual affairs. The entrance examination 
of those days was by no means the boys' play 
that is sometimes asserted. It represented, no 
doubt, a year less of work than the present ex- 
amination ; yet it included some points not now 
made obligatory, as for instance the render- 
ing of English into Greek and Latin. We 
were also called upon to translate at sight 
from authors not previously read, although this 
provision did not appear in the catalogues, 
and is usually cited as of more recent origin. 
Once fairly inside, my class was lucky enough 
to encounter a very exceptional period, — the 
time, namely, when a temporary foray into the 
elective system took place, anticipating in a 
small way the very desirable results which have 
followed from its later application ; although 
that first experiment was, unluckily, discon- 
tinued in a few years under a more conserva- 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 49 

tive president. Meanwhile, the class of 1841 
was one of the very few which enjoyed its 
benefits. Under the guidance of George Tick- 
nor, the method had long been applied to the 
modern languages ; but we were informed one 
day, to our delight, that it was to be extended 
also to mathematics, with a prospect of further 
expansion. As a matter of fact, the word 
" elective " did not appear on the college cata- 
logues until 1841-42, but for two years previous 
this special announcement about mathematics 
had been given in a footnote. The spirit of a 
new freedom began at once to make itself felt 
in other departments ; the Latin and Greek 
professors, for instance, beginning to give lec- 
tures, though in an irregular way, in addition 
to their usual duty of extracting from us what 
small knowledge we possessed. The reason 
why the experiment was made with mathe- 
matics was understood to be that Professor 
Peirce had grown weary of driving boys through 
the differential calculus by force, and Profes- 
sor Channing had declared that all taste for 
mathematics was a matter of special inspira- 
tion. For myself, I eagerly took this study as 
an elective, with about ten classmates ; nor had 
I any reason to repent the choice. 

Professor Benjamin Peirce, our mathematical 
teacher, was then put, by general opinion, at the 



so CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

head of American mathematicians, — a place 
which, I believe, he still retains by tradition. In 
his later years, and after the abandonment of the 
temporary elective method, he may have be- 
come discouraged or apathetic, but when I knew 
him he was in his prime, and he was to me of 
all teachers the most inspiring and delightful. 
He was then a very handsome man, with the 
most eager and ardent manner, alternating with 
deep absorption, and he gave beyond all others 
the effect of original and creative genius. We 
studied, by an added stroke of good luck, his 
" Curves and Functions," which was just pass- 
ing through the press, and the successive parts 
of which were bound up for our use. This in- 
creased the charm ; it seemed like mathematics 
in the process of construction. I was already 
old enough to appreciate the wonderful compact- 
ness and close reasoning of these volumes, and 
to enter with eager zest into filling the inter- 
mediate gaps afforded by the long steps often 
taken from one equation to another. Dr. Bow- 
ditch, the translator of Laplace's " Mecanique 
Cdeste," used to say that whenever he came to 
one of Laplace's "Whence it plainly appears," 
he was in for an hour or two of toil in order to 
make this exceeding plainness visible. It was 
often so with Peirce's books, but this enhanced 
the pleasure of the chase. He himself took 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 51 

part in it : a thought would sometimes flash 
into his mind, and he would begin to work it 
out on the blackboard before our eyes ; for- 
getting our very existence, he would labor 
away with the chalk, writing out with light- 
ning rapidity a series of equations, smaller 
and smaller, chasing his scientific prey down 
into the utmost right-hand corner of the black- 
board, and finally turning to us with a sigh 
when the pursuit was ended. Again was the 
science of mathematics being created before 
our very eyes ; it was like being present at the 
first discoveries of some old Greek or Arabian 
geometrician. Peirce had also the delightful 
quality of being especially interested in all of 
this his first voluntary class, and indeed of 
greatly overrating their merits. When I left 
college, he gave me an indorsement which took 
my breath away, and had me placed, at eigh- 
teen, on the examining committee in his de- 
partment. Years after, when in a fair way to 
pass some time in jail after an anti-slavery riot, 
I met him, and said that I had reserved that 
period of imprisonment for reviewing mathe- 
matics and reading Laplace. His fine eyes 
kindled, and he replied, " In that case, I sin- 
cerely hope that you may go there." He was 
then vehemently opposed to the abolitionists, 
and it seemed a double blessing to gag one of 



52 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

them and at the same time create a mathema- 
tician. The indictment was, unluckily, quashed, 
so that both his hopes were disappointed. 

Next to Peirce's teaching came, without 
question, both in stimulus and in attractions, 
the English course of Professor Edward Tyr- 
rel Channing. Professor Wendell has lately 
spoken of the present standard of training in 
English composition at Harvard as if it were 
quite a new thing ; but with some opportunity 
of observing it, I have never had reason to 
think it any new departure as compared with 
that given by Professor Channing down to 
1 84 1 at least. The evidence would seem to be 
that between that period and 1846, when Pro- 
fessor Child graduated. Professor Channing had 
in some way lost his hold upon his pupils as 
his years advanced ; so that when Professor 
Child succeeded to the chair, in 185 1, it was 
with a profound distrust in the whole affair, 
insomuch that the very department of rhetoric 
and oratory came near being wiped out of exist- 
ence, and was saved by the indignant protest of 
the late Charles Francis Adams. 

Certain it is that this department was, in my 
time, by far the most potent influence in de- 
termining college rank, and therefore in stim- 
ulating ambition. We wrote themes every 
fortnight and forensic s once a month ; and as 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 53 

these were marked on a scale of 48, and or- 
dinary recitations on a scale of 8, the impor- 
tance of this influence may be seen. Never 
in my life have I had to meet such exacting 
criticism on anything written as came from 
Professor Channing, and never have I had any 
praise so encouraging as his. My marks were 
often second in the class, sometimes equaling 
— O day of glory ! — those of my classmate, 
Francis Edward Parker, who was easily first ; 
and to have a passage read to the class for 
praise, even anonymously, was beyond all other 
laurels, though the satisfaction might be marred 
occasionally by the knowledge that my elder 
sister had greatly helped in that particular sen- 
tence. When it is considered that Channing's 
method reared most of the well-known writers 
whom New England was then producing, — 
that it was he who trained Emerson, C. F. 
Adams, Hedge, A. P. Peabody, Felton, Hillard, 
Winthrop, Holmes, Sumner, Motley, Phillips, 
Bowen, Lovering, Torrey, Dana, Lowell, Tho- 
reau. Hale, Thomas Hill, Child, Fitzedward 
Hall, Lane, and Norton, — it will be seen that 
the classic portion of our literature came largely 
into existence under him. He fulfilled the 
aspiration attributed to Increase Mather when 
he wished to become president of Harvard Col- 
lege : to mould not merely the teaching, but 



54 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

the teachers, — non lapides dolare, sed archi- 
tcctos. 

The controlling influence of a college is 
determined, of course, by its officers, and I 
have never felt that we had anything in respect 
of which we could complain. The experience 
lately described by an elder contemporary of 
discovering that he personally knew more than 
at least the tutors of his time was one which 
never troubled me. Two of the four tutors, 
Bowen and Lovering, were men eminent as 
scholars from youth to old age ; the third, 
Jones Very, was a man of genius ; and the 
fourth, Charles Mason, — now Judge Mason, of 
Fitchburg, — certainly knew incomparably more 
of Latin than I did. Of the older professors, 
Felton was a cultivated Greek scholar, and 
Beck brought to Latin the thoroughness of his 
German drill. I need not say what it was to 
read French with Longfellow; and it is plea- 
sant to remember that once — during one of 
those preposterous little rebellions which then 
occurred every two or three years, and which 
have wholly disappeared under a freer disci- 
pline — when the students were gathered in 
the * college yard, and had refused to listen 
to several professors, there was a hush when 
Longfellow appeared, and my classmate, John 
Revere, cried out, " We will hear Professor 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 55 

Longfellow, for he always treats us like gentle- 
men." Longfellow was the first, I think, to 
introduce the prefix "Mr," in addressing stu- 
dents, a thing now almost universal. 

For our other modern-language teachers, we 
had Pietro Bachi, a picturesque Italian refugee ; 
in German, Bernard Roelker, since well known 
as a lawyer in New York ; and we had that 
delightful old Francis Sales, whom Lowell has 
commemorated, as our teacher of Spanish. In 
him we had a man who might have stepped 
bodily out of the Gil Bias and Don Quixote 
he taught. We never knew whether he was 
French or Spanish. He was then about sixty- 
five, and his robust head and shoulders, his 
pigtail and powdered hair, with his quaint ac- 
cent, made him seem the survival of some pic- 
turesque and remote age. He was, moreover, 
extremely indulgent, gave the highest marks 
for recitations, and was in all respects a favor- 
ite. A classmate who sat next me, George Hay, 
took delight in inflicting upon the innocent 
old man the most incredible or old-fashioned 
English oaths as equivalent to the quaint Span- 
ish expletives ; and when he gravely introduced 
" Odds' fish " or "Gogzounds," Mr. Sales would 
look bewildered for a moment, and then roll 
out his stentorian " Ha ! ha ! ha ! By Jorge ! " 
in a way to add still further to the list of unex- 



56 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

pected phrases, and to make the dusty room in 
Massachusetts Hall jubilant for that day. 

President Quincy was popular among us, but 
lost direct weight in our minds through his 
failure of memory and the necessity of con- 
stantly telling him who we were. Dr. Walker 
we admired because of his wise and sententious 
preaching, and his reputation, not unjustified, 
of peculiar penetration into character. Jared 
Sparks lectured on history, under great disad- 
vantages ; and I have always been gratified 
that it was from him — a man accounted unim- 
aginative — that for the first time the thought 
was suggested to us of the need of imagina- 
tion to an historian, not for the purpose of 
invention, but for re-creating a given period 
and shaping it in the representation. Dr. Har- 
ris, the librarian and naturalist, was always 
a delightful teacher and friend, and I espe- 
cially enjoyed attendance on his private class in 
entomology, in the evening, for which we got 
no college credits. Sometimes we took walks 
with him, or brought him new plants or but- 
terflies. I was secretary of the college Nat- 
ural History Society for a time, and in looking 
back on the various reports written by me for 
its meetings, it is interesting to see that this 
wholly voluntary work had a freshness and 
vigor beyond what I can now trace in any of 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 57 

the "themes" of which Professor Charming 
thought so well. There is no greater mark of 
progress in the university than the expansion 
of its electives to include the natural sciences. 
My own omnivorousness in study was so great 
that I did not suffer very much from our re- 
stricted curriculum ; but there were young men 
in my time who would have graduated in these 
later days with highest honors in some depart- 
ment of physics or biology, but who were then 
at the very foot of the class, and lost for life 
the advantage of early training in the studies 
they loved. Akin to this modern gain and 
equally unquestionable is the advantage now 
enjoyed in the way of original research. Every 
year young men of my acquaintance come to 
me for consultation about some thesis they are 
preparing in history or literature^ and they little 
know the envy with which they inspire their 
adviser ; that they should be spared from the 
old routine to investigate anything for them- 
selves seems such a happiness. 

There is not the slightest doubt in my mind, 
as an extra-collegiate observer, of the vast im- 
provement made by the elective system ; and I 
should like to see it extended yet more widely, 
so as to annul absolutely all distinction in grade 
between " academic " and " scientific " courses. 
The day of universal scholarship, when Plutarch 



58 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

or Bacon could go the round of knowledge and 
label every item, is as extinct as the saurian 
epoch. The world is simply too large. The 
most enthusiastic scholar must forego ten times 
as many paths as he can pursue, and must re- 
sign himself to be a specialist. It is inevitable, 
but it has obvious disadvantages. The last of 
the old-fashioned Cambridge scholars of whom 
one could ask a miscellaneous question, with 
prospect of answer, died with the late Professor 
Torrey. I now know that I can make no in- 
quiry so difficult but there is probably some 
man in Cambridge who can answer it ; yet it 
may take a week of investigation to ascertain 
just who that man is. On the other hand, 
the things which these wise men do not know 
are constantly surprising, at least to a survivor 
of the less specializing period. I have had a 
professor of political economy stop me in the 
street to ask who Charles Brockden Brown 
was ; and when I suggested to a senior student 
who was seeking a lecturer for some society 
that he might ask John Fiske, he replied that 
he had never heard his name. Now, I knew 
all about Charles Brockden Brown before I was 
twelve years old, from Sparks's "American Bio- 
graphy," and it was not easy to see how any one 
could read the newspapers, even three or four 
years ago, and not be familiar with the name of 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 59 

John Fiske. Yet this specialization extends, 
in truth, to all classes of the community. A 
Boston lawyer, the other day, told a friend 
of mine that, in his opinion, the Harvard pro- 
fessors were less eminent than formerly. My 
friend replied with truth that the only differ- 
ence was that they were less likely to be all- 
round men, known to everybody ; but that the 
teachers of to-day were more likely to be emi- 
nent in some particular department, in which 
they usually knew far more than their prede- 
cessors. " There is, for instance," he said, 
" Professor Farlow, who has an international 
reputation as an authority in cryptogamic bot- 
any." " I never even heard of him," said the 
lawyer, " nor of cryptogamic botany, either." 

The same change is apparent in the vary- 
ing standards of athletic exercise. To those 
who loved, as I did, the old-time football, — 
the very thud of the ball, the scent of bruised 
grass, the mighty rush of a hundred men, the 
swift and cool defense, — there is something 
insufficient in the presence of a whole univer- 
sity sitting and shivering in the chill wind 
around an arena where a few picked gladiators 
push and wrestle ; while those who know every 
point of the new contest feel a natural con- 
tempt for the crudities of the old. So those 
who now regard with surprise, or even lift with 



6o CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

irreverence, the heavy three-cornered bats and 
large balls of the game we called cricket — the 
very implements used by my own class are 
deposited at the Hemenway Gymnasium — do 
not know that their comments are like those of 
Saladin on the heavy sword of King Richard, 
which ponderous weapon, after all, did good 
service in its day. The joy of athletic exercises 
is a part of the youth to which they belong, 
and does not depend upon the advance of sci- 
ence ; nor is the admiration of their heroes a 
matter of to-day only. I never saw the late 
Charles Franklin Shimmin, of Boston, up to 
his dying day, that I did not recall the thrill 
of admiration for his unequaled "rushes" on 
the football field ; and when we casually met, 
we always talked about them. Of the two best 
bowlers in my class, the one, Charles Sedg- 
wick, was at the head of the class in scholar- 
ship, and the other, Eben William Rollins, was 
far down in the rank list, but they were equally 
our heroes at the cricketing hour. The change 
chiefly perceptible to me to-day is that whereas 
we were proud of Sedgwick's scholarship as 
well as of his bowling, it is likely that, in the 
present intense absorption in what may be 
called vicarious athletics, any amount of intel- 
lectual eminence would count but as the dust 
on the fly-wheel. In this respect we go a little 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 6i 

further just now, I fancy, than our English 
kinsfolk. It is a rare thing in our American 
Cambridge to hear of any student as being 
admired for his scholarship ; but when I was 
taken, twenty years ago, to see the intercolle- 
giate races at the older Cambridge, my friends 
were as careful to point out the men who were 
" great swells " in chemistry or in Greek as to 
call my attention to " the celebrated stroke, 
Goldie." 

The class to which I belonged — the class of 
1 84 1 — was compact and tolerably well united, 
though small. It had perhaps more than the 
usual share of class feeling, which probably 
dated from the time when we had the rare 
experience of defeating the sophomores at the 
opening game of football. There was an im- 
pression that the Faculty were rather afraid of 
us, a view which would probably have much 
astonished those worthy gentlemen had it ever 
reached their ears. The strongest impression 
which is conveyed by looking back on our num- 
ber collectively, after a half century's lapse, is 
that of the utter impossibility of casting in 
advance the horoscope of a whole set of young 
men. The class numbered several who after- 
wards won distinction in different walks in life ; 
and while the actual careers of some might 
have been predicted, there were other lives 



62 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

which could not possibly have been anticipated 
by any of us. It required no great foresight to 
guess that Edward Clarke and Francis Minot 
would be physicians, and even eminent ones ; 
that Rufus Woodward, of Worcester, would also 
be a physician, and a naturalist besides ; that 
Thomas Church Haskell Smith, of Ohio, who 
was universally known among us as " Captain 
Smith," and was the natural leader of the 
class, in case of civil war would become Major- 
General Smith, and chief of staff in the Army 
of the Potomac. Wickham Hoffman, of New 
York, showed in college the same steadfast and 
manly qualities which made him also prominent 
during the war as a staff officer at New Orleans, 
and afterwards as secretary of the American 
legation during the siege of Paris. Other in- 
stances might be cited ; but, on the other hand, 
our class produced three men, all well known 
in later life, whose precise paths were such as 
no one of the class could ever by any possibility 
have guessed. Frank Parker, our first scholar, 
might naturally, we should all have said, reach 
the Supreme Bench in rapid strides ; our am- 
bition for him was unbounded ; but that he 
should, instead of this, become the greatest 
business lawyer in Boston, that he should have 
charge of vast estates, that he should die rich, 
that his pall-bearers should be bank presidents 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 63 

and millionaires, this was something that no one 
could have credited in advance. He had to be 
very economical in college, as had most of us, 
— he could go without what he wanted, — but 
certainly I never surmised in him any peculiar 
gift for the especially judicious investment of a 
half dollar. It is a curious illustration of what 
it is now the fashion to call " heredity " that 
when this same remark was made to the late 
Dr. A. P. Peabody, who had been Parker's pas- 
tor, he replied that it was perfectly true so far 
as it went, but that any one who had known 
Parker's father would have comprehended the 
whole affair. The latter, he said, although a 
clergyman, was the business adviser of half the 
men in his parish. 

In another instance, which was yet more re- 
markable, I know of no such explanation. Not 
a classmate of Henry Fowle Durant's would 
ever have dreamed of the two achievements 
which have probably secured for his name a 
longer remembrance than will be awarded to 
any other member of the class ; no one would 
have deemed it possible that he would make 
a fortune by the practice of criminal law, and 
then devote it to founding a woman's college. 
He lived out of the college yard, was little 
known in the class, was to all appearances in- 
dolent or without concentration — one of the 



64 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

men whose favorite literature lies in old English 
plays. His very name was not that by which 
he afterwards became noted ; it being originally 
Henry Welles Smith, and being changed subse- 
quently to gratify a relative who was also his 
benefactor. 

Stranger than even this transformation of 
name and career was the third bit of the unex- 
pected. The only member of the class who 
ever landed in the state's prison was precisely 
and unequivocally the most dignified and re- 
spectable man we mustered, — a man abso- 
lutely stainless as we knew him, whose whole 
aspect and bearing carried irresistible weight, 
and who was chosen by acclamation as the 
treasurer of our class fund. In truth, it was 
his face and manner that were his ruin ; he was 
a lawyer and had charge of estates ; trustful 
widows and orphans thronged round him and 
believed in him up to the moment the prison 
doors opened to receive him ; he could no 
more resist such perilous confidence than 
could Shakespeare's Autolycus, and might say 
with him, " If I had a mind to be honest, I see 
Fortune would not suffer me." 

My only really intimate friend in the class 
was Parker, already named, who, although two 
years older than myself, and of more staidness 
of temperament and maturity of character, had 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 65 

great influence over me, and was wonderfully 
patient with my often serious errors. I fre- 
quently spent nights at his room, and we had 
few secrets from each other. All this was in 
a certain way creditable to us both, — though 
more so to him, in proportion as he was the 
superior, — inasmuch as it was a period when 
the ambition for college rank was intensely 
strong, and we were running neck and neck 
for the first place, through the time of our 
greatest intimacy. He was the better writer, 
reasoner, and classicist ; while I was fond of 
mathematics, which he hated, and was more 
successful than he in modern languages. Later, 
I discovered that we had been extremely close 
together in rank, most of the time, I sometimes 
passing him ; and that he came out first by 
only some thirty or forty marks among many 
thousands. It was the only fitting conclu- 
sion ; and as we were greatly separated, in ma- 
turer life, by his conservative and my radical 
tendencies, I rejoice to record this tribute to 
his memory. He had, even while in college, a 
certain cynicism, which was later very much 
developed, and rather marred his popularity ; 
but his influence on us all was of the greatest 
value, as it was afterwards in the whole com- 
munity where he lived. 

I formed in college two other friendships, 



66 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

outside my own class, both with men who sub- 
sequently rendered real service to literature 
and art. One was the late Charles Callahan 
Perkins, who became the author of works on 
the Tuscan and Italian sculptors, and was 
practically the founder of the Normal Art 
School in Boston, and of the whole system of 
art instruction in the public schools of Mas- 
sachusetts. He was my room-mate during the 
senior year, and a most attractive person ; hand- 
some, refined, manly, without brilliant gifts, 
but with the most cultivated tastes and — a 
convenience quite rare among us — a liberal 
income. He was one of the few instances I 
have known of a man's being really helped 
and enlarged in his career by the possession of 
wealth — or what then passed for wealth — in 
youth. The other companion, who did more 
for my literary tastes than all other friends, 
was the late Levi Lincoln Thaxter, who in 
after-life helped more than any one to make 
Browning and Fitzgerald known in this coun- 
try, — they being more widely read here in 
each case, for a time, than in their own land. 
This was the more remarkable as Thaxter 
never saw either of them, although he corre- 
sponded with Browning, who also wrote the 
inscription for his grave. Thaxter was about 
my age, though he was, like Perkins, two years 



A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 67 

younger in college ; he was not a high scholar, 
but he was an ardent student of literature, and 
came much under the influence of his cousin, 
Maria White, and of Lowell, her betrothed. 
Thaxter first led me to Emerson and to Haz- 
litt ; the latter being for both of us a tempo- 
rary and the former a lifelong source of influ- 
ence. We were both lovers of Longfellow, 
also, and used to sit at the open window every 
New Year's Eve and read aloud his " Midnight 
Mass to the Dying Year." Thaxter was an en- 
thusiastic naturalist, which was another bond 
of union, and he bequeathed this taste to his 
youngest son, now an assistant professor of bot- 
any in Harvard University. To Thaxter I owe, 
finally, the great privilege of borrowing from 
Maria White the first thin volumes of Tenny- 
son's poems, which seemed to us, as was once 
said of Keats, to " double the value of words ; " 
and we both became, a few years later, sub- 
scribers to the original yellow-covered issue of 
Browning's "Bells and Pomegranates." Thax- 
ter's personal modesty and reticence, and the 
later fame of his poet-wife, Celia, have obscured 
him to the world ; but he was one of the most 
loyal and high-minded of men. 

At my graduation I was four months short 
of eighteen, and my purpose was to teach for a 
few years, and then to study law. This early 



68 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

maturity had, however, one obvious advantage : 
that it would plainly give me more time to turn 
round, to pursue general study, and, if need be, 
to revise my choice of a pursuit. I ultimately 
used the interval for just these purposes, and 
was so far a gainer. In all other respects my 
youthfulness was a great disadvantage, and I 
have often dissuaded others from following my 
example in entering college too young. If 
they disregard the remonstrance, as is usually 
the case, great patience and charity are due 
them. The reason for this is that precocity 
scarcely ever extends through all the faculties 
at once, and those who are older than their 
years in some respects are almost always 
younger in others, — this being nature's way of 
restoring the balance. Even if intellect and 
body are alike precocious, the judgment and 
the moral sense may remain weak and imma- 
ture. Development in other respects, there- 
fore, creates false expectations and brings un- 
foreseen temptations of its own. This was, at 
any rate, the result in my case, although it 
took me several years to find it out. The 
experience of those years demands, however, a 
chapter by itself. 



Ill 

THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 

" Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
But to be young was very heaven." 

Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book XI. 

The above was the high - sounding name 
which was claimed for their own time by the 
youths and maidens who, under the guidance 
of Emerson, Parker, and others, took a share in 
the seething epoch sometimes called vaguely 
Transcendentalism. But as these chapters are 
to be mainly autobiographic, it is well to state 
with just what outfit I left college in 184 1. I 
had a rather shallow reading knowledge of six 
languages, English, French, Spanish, Italian, 
Latin, and Greek, and had been brought in 
contact with some of the best books in each of 
these tongues. I may here add that I picked 
up at a later period German, Portuguese, and 
Hebrew, with a little Swedish ; and that I 
hope to live long enough to learn at least the 
alphabet in Russian. Then I had acquired 
enough of the higher mathematics to have a 
pupil or two in that branch ; something of the 



70 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

forms of logic and of Locke's philosophy with 
the criticisms of the French eclectics upon it ; a 
smattering of history and political economy ; 
some crude acquaintance with field natural 
history ; some practice in writing and debating ; 
a passion for poetry and imaginative literature ; 
a voracious desire for all knowledge and all 
action ; and an amount of self-confidence which 
has now, after more than half a century, sadly 
diminished. It will be seen that this was an 
outfit more varied than graduates of the present 
day are apt to possess, but that it was also 
more superficial ; their knowledge of what they 
know being often far more advanced as well 
as more solidly grounded than was mine. No 
matter ; I was a happy boy, ankle-deep in a yet 
unfathomed sea. 

I had two things in addition not set down 
in the college curriculum, but of the utmost 
influence on my future career. One of these 
has always been to me somewhat inexplicable. 
Cambridge was then a place of distinctly graded 
society, — more so, probably, than it is now. 
Lowell has admirably described the superb 
way in which old Royal Morse, the village con- 
stable and auctioneer, varied the courtesy of his 
salutation according to the social position of 
his acquaintance. I can remember no conver- 
sation around me looking toward the essential 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 71 

equality of the human race, except as it was 
found in the pleased curiosity with which my 
elder brothers noted the fact that the Presi- 
dent's man-servant, who waited at table during 
his dinner parties, became on the muster field 
colonel of the militia regiment, and as such gave 
orders to Major Quincy, there his subordinate, 
but at other times his employer. In each pro- 
fessor's family there was apt to be a country 
boy " living out," " doing chores " and attending 
school ; these boys often rose to influence and 
position in later life, and their children or de- 
scendants are now professors in the university 
and leaders in Cambridge society. The "town 
school " was distinctly a grade school ; I had 
never entered it ; did not play much with the 
"town boys," and was rather afraid of them. 
Yet it must have been that there was left over 
from the American Revolution something of 
the popular feeling then inspired, for without 
aid or guidance I was democratic in feeling; 
longed to know something of all sorts and con- 
ditions of men, and had a distinct feeling that I 
should like to be, for a year or two, a mechanic 
of some kind — a carpenter or blacksmith — 
in order to place myself in sympathy with all. 
The nearest I ever came to this was in making 
some excursions with an elder brother who, as 
engineer, was laying out the track of the Old 



72 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

Colony Railroad, and who took me as "hind 
chain man " at a dollar a day. I still recall 
with delight the sense of honest industry, the 
tramping through the woods, and the occasional 
dinners at farmhouses. It was at one of these 
festivities that, when my brother had eaten one 
piece of mince pie but declined a second help- 
ing, our host remarked with hospitable dignity, 
" Consult your feelings, sir, about the meat 
pie." 

Another most important change was passing 
in me at about this time ; the sudden develop- 
ment of social aptitudes hitherto dormant. As 
an overgrown boy — for I was six feet tall at 
fourteen — I had experienced all the agonies 
of bashfulness in the society of the other sex, 
though greatly attracted to it. I find it diffi- 
cult to convince my associates of later years 
that I then habitually sat mute while others 
chattered. A word or two of remonstrance 
from my mother had in a single day corrected 
this, during my senior year, so far as the fam- 
ily table was concerned ; and this emboldened 
me to try the experiment on a wider field. I 
said to myself, thinking of other young men 
who made themselves quite agreeable, "These 
youths are not your superiors, — perhaps, in the 
recitation - room or on the playground, hardly 
your equals ; why not cope with them else- 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 73 

where ? " Thus influenced, I conquered myself 
in a single evening and lost my shyness for- 
ever. The process was unique, so far as I 
know, and I have often recommended it to shy 
young men. Being invited to a small party, I 
considered beforehand what young ladies would 
probably be there. With each one I had, of 
course, something in common, — kinship, or 
neighborhood, or favorite pursuit. This would 
do, I reasoned, for a starting-point ; so I put 
down on a small sheet of paper what I would 
say to each, if I happened to be near her. It 
worked like a charm ; I found myself chatting 
away, the whole evening, and heard the next 
day that everybody was surprised at the trans- 
formation, I have to this day the little bit 
of magic paper, on which I afterwards un- 
derscored, before sleeping, the points actually 
used. 

It set me free; after this I went often to 
tolerably large parties in Cambridge and Boston, 
in the latter case under guidance of my brother 
Waldo, who had now graduated from the Har- 
vard Washington Corps into the Boston Cadets, 
and was an excellent social pilot, I saw the 
really agreeable manners which then prevailed 
in the little city, and cannot easily be convinced 
that there are now in the field any youths at 
once so manly and so elegant as were the two 



74 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

especial leaders among the beaux of that day, 
John Lothrop Motley and his brother-in-law, 
John Lewis Stackpole. It did not surprise me 
to read in later days that the former was habit- 
ually addressed as " Milord," to a degree that 
vexed him, by waiters in Continental hotels. 
Such leaders were doubtless good social mod- 
els, as was also the case with my brother ; but 
I had more continuous injfluences in the friend- 
ship of two fair girls, both of whom were frank, 
truthful, and attractive. One of them — Maria 
Fay of convent fame, already mentioned — was 
a Uttle older than myself, while the other, just 
my own age, Mary Devens, was the younger 
sister of Charles Devens, afterwards eminent in 
war and peace. She died young, but I shall al- 
ways be grateful for the good she unconsciously 
did me ; and I had with both the kind of cor- 
dial friendship, without a trace of love-making, 
yet tinged with refined sentiment, which is 
for every young man a most fortunate school. 
They counseled and reprimanded and laughed 
at me, when needful, in a way that I should not 
have tolerated from boys at that time, nor yet 
from my own sisters, wise and judicious though 
these were. Added to all this was a fortunate 
visit, during my last year in college, to some 
cousins on a Virginia plantation, where my 
uncle, Major Storrow, had married into the 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 75 

Carter family, and where I experienced the hos- 
pitality and gracious ways of Southern life. 

A potent influence was also preparing for me 
in Cambridge in a peculiarly fascinating circle 
of young people, — more gifted, I cannot help 
thinking, than any later coterie of the same 
kind, — which seemed to group itself round 
James Lowell and Maria White, his betrothed, 
who were known among the members as their 
"King and Queen." They called themselves 
" The Brothers and Sisters," being mainly 
made up in that way : the Whites of Water- 
town and their cousins the Thaxters ; the 
Storys from Cambridge ; the Hales and the 
Tuckermans from Boston ; the Kings from 
Salem, and others. They had an immense and 
hilarious intimacy, rarely, however, for some 
reason, culminating in intermarriage ; they read 
the same books, and had perpetual gatherings 
and picnics, their main headquarters being the 
large colonial house of the White family in 
Watertown. My own point of contact with 
them was remote, but real ; my mother had re- 
moved, when her family lessened, to a smaller 
house built by my elder brother, and belonging 
in these latter days to Radcliffe College. This 
was next door to the Fay House of that insti- 
tution, then occupied by Judge Fay. And as 
my friend Maria Fay was a cousin of some of 



>](> CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

the Brothers and Sisters, they made the house 
an occasional rendezvous ; and as there were 
attractive younger kindred whom I chanced to 
know, I was able at least to look through the 
door of this paradise of youth. 

Lowell's first volume had just been pub- 
lished, and all its allusions were ground of ro- 
mance for us all ; indeed, he and his betrothed 
were to me, as they seemed to be for those 
of their circle, a modernized Petrarch and 
Laura or even Dante and Beatrice ; and I 
watched them with unselfish reverence. Their 
love-letters, about which they were extremely 
frank, were passed from hand to hand, and 
sometimes reached me through Thaxter. I 
have some of Maria White's ballads in her own 
handwriting ; and I still know by heart a letter 
which she wrote to Thaxter, about the delay 
in her marriage, — " It is easy enough to be 
married ; the newspaper corners show us that, 
every day ; but to live and to be happy as sim- 
ple King and Queen, without the gifts of for- 
tune, this is a triumph that suits my nature 
better." Probably all the atmosphere around 
this pair of lovers had a touch of exaggeration, 
a slight greenhouse aroma, but it brought a 
pure and ennobling enthusiasm ; and whenever 
I was fortunate enough to hear Maria White 
sing or " say " ballads in moonlight evenings it 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 77 

seemed as if I were in Boccaccio's Florentine 
gardens. 

If this circle of bright young people was not 
strictly a part of the Transcendental Move- 
ment, it was yet born of "the Newness." 
Lowell and Story, indeed, both wrote for " The 
Dial," and Maria White had belonged to Mar- 
garet Fuller's classes. There was, moreover, 
passing through the whole community a wave 
of that desire for a freer and more ideal life 
which made Story turn aside from his father's 
profession to sculpture, and made Lowell for- 
sake law after his first client. It was the time 
when Emerson wrote to Carlyle, " We are all 
a little wild here with numberless projects of 
social reform ; not a reading man but has a 
draft of a new community in his waistcoat 
pocket." I myself longed at times to cut free 
from prescribed bondage, and not, in Lowell's 
later phrase, to " pay so much of life for a liv- 
ing " as seemed to be expected. I longed anew, 
under the influence of George Sand and of Mrs. 
Child's " Letters from New York," to put myself 
on more equal terms with that vast army of 
hand-workers who were ignorant of much that 
I knew, yet could do so much that I could not. 

Under these combined motives I find that I 
carefully made out, at one time, a project of 
going into the cultivation of peaches, an in- 



78 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

dustry then prevalent in New England, but 
now practically abandoned, — thus securing 
freedom from study and thought by moderate 
labor of the hands. This was in 1843, two 
years before Thoreau tried a similar project 
with beans at Walden Pond ; and also before 
the time when George and Burrill Curtis un- 
dertook to be farmers at Concord. A like 
course was actually adopted and successfully 
pursued through life by another Harvard man 
a few years older than myself, the late Marston 
Watson, of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Such 
things were in the air, and even those who 
were not swerved by " the Newness " from their 
intended pursuits were often greatly modified 
as to the way in which these were undertaken ; 
as when the recognized leader of a certain class 
of the Harvard Law School abandoned, from 
conscientious scruples, the career of a practicing 
lawyer, and spent his life as a conveyancer. 

What turned me away from the study of the 
law was not this moral scruple, but what was 
doubtless an innate preference, strengthened 
by the influence of one man and one or two 
books. After leaving college I taught for six 
months as usher in the boarding-school at Ja- 
maica Plain, kept by Mr. Stephen Minot Weld ; 
and then, greatly to my satisfaction, became 
private tutor to the three young sons of my 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 79 

cousin, Stephen Higginson Perkins, a Boston 
merchant, residing in a pretty cottage which 
he had designed for himself in Brookline. In 
him I encountered the most attractive man I 
had yet met and the one who was most to 
influence me. He was indeed a person of 
unique quahties and great gifts ; he was in the 
prime of life, handsome and refined, a widower, 
whose modest household was superintended by 
a maiden sister ; his training had been utterly 
unlike my regular academical career; he had 
been sent to Germany to school, under the 
guidance of Edward Everett, then to the East 
and West Indies as supercargo, then into busi- 
ness, but not very successfully as yet. This 
pursuit he hated and disapproved ; all his tastes 
were for art, in which he was at that time per- 
haps the best connoisseur in Boston, and he 
had contrived by strict economy to own several 
good paintings which he bequeathed later to the 
Boston Art Museum, — a Reynolds, a Van der 
Velde, and a remarkable oil copy of the Sistine 
Madonna by Moritz Retzsch. These were the 
first fine paintings I had ever seen, except the 
Copleys then in the Harvard College Library, 
and his society, with that he assembled round 
him, was to me a wholly new experience. He 
disapproved and distrusted all classical train- 
ing, and was indifferent to mathematics ; but he 



8o CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

had read largely in French and German liter- 
ature, and he introduced me to authors of per- 
manent interest, such as Heine and Paul Louis 
Courier. He was also in a state of social revolt, 
enhanced by a certain shyness and by deafness ; 
full of theories, and ready to encourage all inde- 
pendent thinking. He was withal affectionate 
and faithful. 

I was to teach his boys four hours a day, — 
no more ; they were most interesting, though 
not always easy to manage. I was young 
enough to take a ready part in all their sports, 
and we often had school in the woods adjoin- 
ing the house, perhaps sitting in large trees 
and interrupting work occasionally to watch a 
weasel gliding over a rock or a squirrel in the 
boughs. I took the boys with me in my ram- 
bles and it was a happy time. Another sister 
of Stephen Perkins's, a woman of great per- 
sonal attractions, kept house for her father, who 
lived near by, Mr. Samuel G. Perkins, younger 
brother of Colonel Thomas H. Perkins, then 
the leading merchant of Boston. Mr. Samuel 
Perkins had been at one time a partner of my 
grandfather and had married his daughter, but 
had retired, not very successful, and was one 
of the leading horticulturists near Boston, the 
then famous " Boston nectarine " being a fruit 
of his introducing. His wife, Barbara Higgin- 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 8i 

son, my aunt, had been a belle in her youth, 
but had ripened into an oddity, and lived in 
Boston during the winter and in a tiny cot- 
tage at Nahant during the summer, for the 
professed reason that the barberry blossoms in 
the Brookline lanes made her sneeze. 

The summer life around Boston was then an 
affair so unlike anything now to be found in 
the vicinity as to seem like something observed 
in another country or period. Socially speak- 
ing, it more resembled the plantation life of the 
South or the ranch life of the West. Many of 
the prosperous people lived in Boston all sum- 
mer, with occasional trips to Nahant or Sara- 
toga or Ballston, or for the more adventurous a 
journey by stage among the White Mountains, 
encountering rough roads and still rougher tav- 
erns. But there existed all around Boston, and 
especially in Roxbury, Brookline, and Milton, 
a series of large estates with ample houses, 
all occupied by people connected in blood or 
intimacy, who drove about and exchanged calls 
in summer afternoons. Equipages were sim- 
ple ; people usually drove themselves ; there 
were no liveries, but the hospitality was pro- 
fuse. My uncle Perkins was a poor man com- 
pared with his rich brother ; there was a theory 
that his beautiful pears and nectarines were to 
be a source of profit, but I fear that the bal- 



82 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

ance-sheet, if perchance there ever was any, 
would have shown otherwise. No matter, he 
had the frank outdoor hospitahty of a retired 
East India merchant, which he was ; every 
afternoon, at a certain hour, sherry and madeira 
were set out on the sideboard in the airy parlor, 
with pears, peaches, grapes, nectarines, straw- 
berries and the richest cream, and we knew 
that visitors would arrive. Cousins and friends 
came, time-honored acquaintances of the head 
of the house, eminent public men, Mr. Prescott 
the historian, or Daniel Webster himself, re- 
ceived like a king. Never did I feel a greater 
sense of an honor conferred than when that 
regal black-browed man once selected me as 
the honored messenger to bring more cream 
for his chocolate. 

There was sometimes, though rarely, a little 
music ; and there were now and then simple 
games on the lawn, — battledore or grace- 
hoops, — but as yet croquet and tennis and 
golf were not, and the resources were limited. 
In winter, the same houses were the scene of 
family parties with sleigh-riding and skating 
and coasting ; but the summer life was simply 
a series of outdoor receptions, from house to 
house. It must be noted that Brookline was 
then, as now, the garden suburb of Boston, 
beyond all others ; the claim was only compara- 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 83 

tive, and would not at all stand the test of Eng- 
lish gardening or even of our modern meth- 
ods, except perhaps in the fruit produced. I 
remember that Stephen Perkins once took an 
English visitor, newly arrived, to drive about 
the region, and he was quite ready to admire 
everything he saw, though not quite for the 
reason that his American host expected. " It 
is all so rough and wild " was his comment. 

Into this summer life, on the invitation of 
my cousin Barbara Channing, who spent much 
time in Brookline, there occasionally came dele- 
gations of youths from Brook Farm, then flour- 
ishing. Among these were George and Burrill 
Curtis, and Earned, with Charles Dana, late 
editor of the "New York Sun ; " all presenta- 
ble and agreeable, but the first three peculiarly 
costumed. It was then very common for young 
men in college and elsewhere to wear what 
were called blouses, — a kind of hunter's frock 
made at first of brown holland belted at the 
waist, — these being gradually developed into 
garments of gay-colored chintz, sometimes, it 
was said, an economical transformation of their 
sisters' skirts or petticoats. All the young 
men of this party except Dana wore these gay 
garments and bore on their heads little round 
and visorless caps with tassels. Mr. Perkins, 
whose attire was always defiantly plain, re- 



84 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

garded these vanities with ill-concealed disap- 
proval, but took greatly to Dana, who dressed 
like a well-to-do young farmer and was always 
handsome and manly. My uncle declared him 
to be full of sense and knowledge, and the 
others to be nonsensical creatures. Dana was 
indeed the best all-round man at Brook Farm, 
— a good teacher, editor, and farmer, — but 
was held not to be quite so zealous or unselfish 
for the faith as were some of the others. It 
was curious that when their public meetings 
were held in Boston, he was their most effec- 
tive speaker, while I cannot remember that 
George William Curtis, afterwards so eloquent, 
ever opened his lips at all. 

I was but twice at Brook Farm, once driving 
over there in a sleigh during a snowstorm, to 
convey my cousin Barbara to a fancy ball at 
"the Community," as it was usually called, 
where she was to appear in a pretty Creole 
dress made of madras handkerchiefs and brought 
by Stephen Perkins from the West Indies. 
She was a most attractive and popular person, 
and was enthusiastic about Brook Farm, where 
she went often, being a friend of Mrs. Ripley, 
who was its "leading lady." Again I once 
went for her in summer and stayed for an hour, 
watching the various interesting figures, includ- 
ing George William Curtis, who was walking 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 85 

about in shirtsleeves, with his boots over his trou- 
sers, yet was escorting a young maiden with 
that elegant grace which never left him. It was 
a curious fact that he, who was afterwards 
so eminent, was then held wholly secondary in 
interest to his handsome brother Burrill, whose 
Raphaelesque face won all hearts, and who 
afterwards disappeared from view in England, 
surviving only in memory as Our Cousin the 
Curate, in " Lotus-Eating." But if I did not 
see much of Brook Farm on the spot, I met its 
members frequently at the series of exciting 
meetings for Social Reform in Boston, where 
the battle raged high between Associationists 
and Communists, the leader of the latter being 
John A. Collins. Defenders of the established 
order also took part ; one of the best of the 
latter being Arthur Pickering, a Boston mer- 
chant ; and in all my experience I have never 
heard a speech so thrilling and effective as that 
in which Henry Clapp, then a young radical 
mechanic, answered Pickering's claim that indi- 
viduality was better promoted by the existing 
method of competition. Clapp was afterwards 
the admired leader of a Bohemian clique in 
New York and had a melancholy career ; but 
that speech did more than anything else to 
make me at least a halfway socialist for life. 
The Brook Farm people were also to be met 



86 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

occasionally at Mrs. Harrington's confectionery 
shop in School Street, where they took econo- 
mical refreshments ; and still oftener at Miss 
Elizabeth Peabody's foreign bookstore in West 
Street, which was a part of the educational in- 
fluences of the period. It was an atom of a 
shop, partly devoted to the homoeopathic medi- 
cines of her father, a physician ; and she alone 
in Boston, I think, had French and German 
books for sale. There I made further acquaint- 
ance with Cousin and Jouffroy, with Constant's 
"De la Religion" and Leroux' "De I'Human- 
it6," the relics of the French Eclecticism, then 
beginning to fade, but still taught in colleges. 
There, too, were Schubert's " Geschichte der 
Seele " and many of the German balladists 
who were beginning to enthrall me. There was 
also Miss Peabody herself, desultory, dreamy, 
but insatiable in her love for knowledge and for 
helping others to it. James Freeman Clarke 
said of her that she was always engaged in sup- 
plying some want that had first to be created ; 
it might be Dr. Kraitsir's lectures on language, 
or General Bem's historical chart. She always 
preached the need, but never accomplished the 
supply until she advocated the kindergarten ; 
there she caught up with her mission and came 
to identify herself with its history. She lived 
to be very old, and with her broad benevolent 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 87 

face and snowy curls was known to many as 
"The Grandmother of Boston." I best asso- 
ciate her with my last interview, a little before 
her death, when I chanced to pick her out of a 
snowdrift into which she had sunk overwhelmed 
during a furious snowsquall, while crossing a 
street in Boston. I did not know her until she 
had scrambled up with much assistance, and 
recognizing me at once, fastened on my offered 
arm, saying breathlessly, " I am so glad to see 
you, I have been wishing to talk to you about 
Sarah Winnemucca. Now Sarah Winnemucca " 
— and she went on discoursing as peacefully 
about a maligned Indian protegee as if she were 
strolling in some sequestered moonlit lane, on 
a summer evening. 

I have said that the influence wrought upon 
me by Brookline life was largely due to one 
man and one or two writers. The writer who 
took possession of me, after Emerson, was the 
German author, Jean Paul Richter, whose me- 
moirs had just been written by a Brookline 
lady, Mrs. Thomas Lee. This biography set 
before me, just at the right time, the attrac- 
tions of purely literary life, carried on in a 
perfectly unworldly spirit ; and his story of 
"Siebenkas," just then opportunely translated, 
presented the same thing in a more graphic 
way. From that moment poverty, or at least 



88 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

extreme economy, had no terrors for me, and I 
could not bear the thought of devoting my life 
to the technicalities of Blackstone. Not that 
the law-book had failed to interest me, — for it 
was a book, — but I could not consent to sur- 
render my life to what it represented, nor have 
I ever repented that decision. I felt instinc- 
tively what the late Dwight Foster said to me 
long after : "The objection to the study of the 
law is not that it is not interesting, — for it is 
eminently so, — but that it fills your mind with 
knowledge which cannot be carried into another 
stage of existence." Long after this, more- 
over, my classmate Durant, at the height of 
his professional success, once stoutly denied to 
me that there was any real interest to be found 
in legal study. "The law," he said, "is sim- 
ply a system of fossilized injustice ; there is 
not enough of intellectual interest about it to 
occupy an intelligent mind for an hour." This 
I do not believe ; and he was probably not the 
highest authority ; yet his remark and Judge 
Foster's always helped me to justify to myself 
that early choice. 

With all this social and intellectual occupa- 
tion, much of my Brookline life was lonely 
and meditative ; my German romances made 
me a dreamer, and I spent much time in the 
woods, nominally botanizing but in reality try- 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 89 

ing to adjust myself, being still only nineteen 
or twenty, to the problems of life. One favor- 
ite place was Hammond's Pond, then cele- 
brated among botanists as the only locality for 
the beautiful Andromeda polifolia, so named by 
Linnaeus because, like the fabled Andromeda, it 
dwelt in wild regions only. The pond was, and 
I believe still is, surrounded by deep woods and 
overhung by a hill covered with moss-grown 
fragments of rock, among which the pink Cy- 
pripeduim or lady's slipper used to grow pro- 
fusely. The Andromeda was on the other side 
of the lake, and some one had left a leaky boat 
there, which I used to borrow and paddle across 
the dark water, past a cedar forest which lined 
it on one side, and made me associate it with 
the gloomy Mummelsee of one of my beloved 
German ballads by August Schnezler : — 

" Amid the gloomy Mummelsee 
Do live the palest lilies many. 
All day they droop so drowsily 
In azure air or rainy, 
But when the dreadful moon of night 
Rains down on earth its yellow light, 
Up spring they, full of lightness, 
In woman's form and brightness." 

My lilies were as pale and as abundant as 
any German lake could ever boast ; and among 
them there was to be seen motionless the black 
prow of some old boat which had sunk at its 



90 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

moorings and looked so uncanny that I never 
would row near it. Above the lake a faint 
path wound up the hill among the rocks, and 
at the summit there was a large detached boul- 
der with a mouldering ladder reaching its top, 
where I used to climb and rest after my long 
rambling. Close by there was one dead pine- 
tree of the older growth towering above the 
younger trees ; and sometimes a homeward 
faring robin or crow would perch and rest 
there as I was resting, or the sweet bell of the 
Newton Theological Seminary on its isolated 
hill would peal out what seemed like the An- 
gelus. 

What with all these dreamings, and the in- 
fluence of Jean Paul and Heine, the desire for 
a free life of study, and perhaps of dreams, 
grew so strong upon me that I decided to go 
back to Cambridge as " resident graduate," — 
there was then no graduate school, — and es- 
tablish myself as cheaply as possible, to live 
after my own will. I was already engaged to 
be married to one of the Brookline cousins, but 
I had taken what my mother called " the vow 
of poverty," and was willing to risk the future. 
Mrs. Farrar, an old friend of the family, with 
whom I had spent a part of the summer before 
entering college, reported with satisfaction that 
she had met me one day driving my own small 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 91 

wagon-load of furniture over muddy roads from 
Brookline to Cambridge, like any emigrant lad, 
whereas the last time she had seen me before 
was at the opera in Boston, with soiled white 
kid gloves on. Never was I happier in my life 
than at that moment of transformation when she 
saw me. It was my Flight into Egypt. 

I established myself in the cheapest room I 
could find, in a house then called "College 
House," and standing on part of the ground 
now occupied by the block of that name. Its 
familiar appellation in Cambridge was " The 
Old Den," and my only housemate at first was 
an eccentric law student, or embryo lawyer, 
popularly known as " Light-House Thomas," 
because he had fitted himself for college in 
one of those edifices. Here at last I could live 
in my own way, making both ends meet by an 
occasional pupil, and enjoying the same free- 
dom which Thoreau, then unknown to me, 
was afterwards to possess in his hut. I did 
not know exactly what I wished to study in 
Cambridge ; indeed, I went there to find out. 
Perhaps I had some vague notion of prepar- 
ing myself for a professorship in literature or 
mathematics and metaphysics, but in the mean 
time I read, as Emerson says of Margaret 
Fuller, "at a rate like Gibbon's." There was 
the obstacle to be faced, which has indeed 



92 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

always proved too much for me, — the enor- 
mous wealth of the world of knowledge, and 
the stupendous variety of that which I wished 
to know. Doubtless the modern elective sys- 
tem, or even a wise teacher, would have helped 
me ; they would have compelled me to con- 
centration, but perhaps I may have absolutely 
needed some such period of intellectual wild 
oats. This was in September, 1843. 

I read in that year, and a subsequent similar 
year, the most desultory and disconnected books, 
the larger the better: Newton's "Principia" and 
Whewell's "Mechanical Euclid;" Ritter's "His- 
tory of Ancient Philosophy;" Sismondi's "De- 
cline and Fall of the Roman Empire;" Lamen- 
nais' "Paroles d'un Croyant " and "Livre du 
Peuple;" Homer and Hesiod; Linnaeus's "Cor- 
respondence ; " Emerson over and over. Fortu- 
nately I kept up outdoor life also and learned 
the point where books and nature meet ; learned 
that Chaucer belongs to spring, German ro- 
mance to summer nights, Amadis de Gaul and 
the Morte d' Arthur to the Christmas time ; 
and found that books of natural history, in Tho- 
reau's phrase, "furnish the cheerfulest winter 
reading." Bettine Brentano and Giinderode — 
the correspondence between the two maidens 
being just then translated by Margaret Fuller 
— also fascinated me ; and I have seldom been 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 93 

happier than when I spent two summer days 
beside the Rhine, many years after, in visiting 
the very haunts where Bettine romanced, and 
the spot where Giinderode died, 

I tried to read all night occasionally, as 
Lowell told me he had sometimes done, and 
as a mathematical classmate of mine had done 
weekly, to my envy; but sleepiness and the 
morning chill soon checked this foolish enter- 
prise. On one of these nights I had an experi- 
ence so nearly incredible that I scarcely dare 
to tell it, yet it was, I believe, essentially true. 
Sitting up till four one morning over a volume 
of Lamennais, I left the mark at an unfinished 
page, having to return the book to the college 
library. A year after I happened to take the 
book from the library again, got up at four 
o'clock to read, began where I left off, and 
afterwards, — not till afterwards, — looking in 
my diary, found that I had simply skipped a 
precise year and gone on with the passage. 

I continued to teach myself German on a 
preposterous plan brought forward in those 
days by a learned Hungarian, Dr. Charles 
Kraitsir, who had a theory of the alphabet, 
and held that by its means all the Indo-Euro- 
pean languages could be resolved into one ; so 
that we could pass from each to another by an 
effort of will, like the process of mind-healing. 



94 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

Tried on the German ballads this method 
proved very seductive, but when one went a 
step farther it turned out very superficial ; as is 
therefore all my knowledge of German, though 
I have read a good deal of it. All this way 
of living was intellectually very risky, as is 
the process of "boarding one's self" — which I 
have also tried — for the body ; and I am glad 
to have come with no more serious injury 
through them both. For a specialist this course 
would have been disastrous, but I was plainly 
not destined for a specialist ; for a predestined 
essayist and public speaker, it was not so bad, 
since to him nothing comes amiss. Fortunately 
it was a period when a tonic influence and a 
cohesive restraint came from a wholly different 
direction ; indeed, I might say from two direc- 
tions. 

The first of these influences was the renewal 
of my acquaintance with Lowell, which had 
been waived during my two years' stay in 
Brookline. He recognized in Thaxter, who 
about this time went to New York to study for 
the dramatic profession, and in myself, two of 
his stoutest advocates. We met a little more 
on a level than before ; the difference of nearly 
five years which had formerly made him only 
my elder brother's crony was now becoming 
less important, and I found myself approaching 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 95 

that maturer period which a clever woman de- 
fined as "the age of everybody." To be sure, 
I could recall the time when my brother had 
come home one evening with the curt remark, 
"Jim Lowell doubts whether he shall really 
be a lawyer, after all ; he thinks he shall be a 
poet." Now that poet was really launched, and 
indeed was "the best launched man of his time," 
as Willis said. I used to go to his room and 
to read books he suggested, such as Putten- 
ham's " Arte of Poesie," and Chapman's plays. 
He did most of the talking ; it was a way he 
had ; but he was always original and trenchant, 
though I sometimes rebelled inwardly at his 
very natural attitude of leadership. We occa- 
sionally walked out together, late in the evening, 
from Emerson's lectures or the concerts which 
were already introducing Beethoven. Some- 
times there was a reception after the lecture, 
usually at the rooms of a youth who was an 
ardent Fourierite, and had upon his door a blaz- 
ing sun, with gilded rays emanating in all direc- 
tions, and bearing the motto " Universal Unity." 
Beneath this appeared a neat black-and-white 
inscription, thus worded : " Please wipe your 
feet." 

Our evening walks from Boston were delight- 
ful ; and Longfellow's poem of "The Bridge" 
does little more than put into verse the thoughts 



96 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

they inspired. The walk was then, as is cer- 
tainly not now the case, a plunge into dark- 
ness ; and there is no other point from which 
the transformation of the older Boston is more 
conspicuous. You now cross the bridge at 
night through a circle of radiant lights glancing 
in brilliant lines through all the suburbs ; but 
in the old nights there was here and there in 
the distance a dim oil lamp ; in time oil gave 
place to kerosene ; then came gas, then electri- 
city, and still the brighter the lamps, the more 
they multiplied. The river itself was different ; 
there were far more vessels, and I have myself 
been hailed on the bridge and offered money to 
pilot a coasting schooner to Watertown. Seals 
also came above the wharves and gave Lowell 
the material for one of his best stories, but 
one which he never, I think, quite ventured to 
print. He saw two farmer lads watching from 
the bridge one of these visitors as he played 
in the water. "Wal, neaow," said one of the 
youths, "be them kind o' critters common up 
this way, do ye suppose .-• Be they — or be 
they.?" "Wal," responded the other, "dun- 
no's they be, and dunno ez they be." This 
perfect flower of New England speech, twin 
blossoms on one stem, delighted Lowell hugely ; 
and it was so unexampled in my own experi- 
ence that it always inspired in me a slight dis- 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 97 

trust, as being too good to be true. Perhaps 
it created a little envy, as was the case with 
Albert Dicey, when he and James Bryce first 
visited America, and I met them at a dinner 
party in Newport. Dicey came in, rubbing 
his hands, and saying with eagerness, "Bryce 
is very happy ; at the Ocean House he has just 
heard a man say European twice ! " 

Another and yet more tonic influence, though 
Lowell was already an ardent Abolitionist, 
came from the presence of reformatory agita- 
tion in the world outside. There were always 
public meetings in Boston to be attended ; 
there were social reform gatherings where I 
heard the robust Orestes Brownson and my 
eloquent cousin William Henry Channing ; 
there were anti-slavery conventions, with Garri- 
son and Phillips ; then on Sunday there were 
Theodore Parker and James Freeman Clarke, 
to show that one might accomplish something 
and lead a manly life even in the pulpit. My 
betrothed was one of the founders of Clarke's 
Church of the Disciples, and naturally drew me 
there ; the services were held in a hall and 
were quite without those merely ecclesiastical 
associations which were then unattractive to 
me, and have never yet, I fear, quite asserted 
their attraction. I learned from Clarke the 
immense value of simplicity of statement and 



98 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

perfect straightforwardness of appeal ; but in 
the direction of pure thought and advanced 
independence of opinion, Theodore Parker was 
my teacher. To this day I sometimes dream 
of going to hear him preach, — the great, free, 
eager congregation ; the strong, serious, com- 
manding presence of the preacher ; his rev- 
erent and earnest prayer; his comprehensive 
hour-long sermon full of sense, knowledge, feel- 
ing, courage, he being not afraid even of his 
own learning, absolutely holding his audience 
in the hollow of his hand. Once in New York 
a few years ago I went to Dr. Rainsford's 
church and felt for a moment or two — not, 
indeed, while the surpliced choir was singing 
— that I was again in the hands of Theodore 
Parker. 

Under the potent influences of Parker and 
Clarke I found myself gravitating toward what 
was then called the " liberal " ministry ; one 
very much secularized it must be, I foresaw, 
to satisfy me. Even in this point of view my 
action was regarded rather askance by some of 
my more strenuous transcendental friends, even 
George William Curtis expressing a little dis- 
approval ; though in later years he himself took 
to the pulpit, — in a yet more secular fashion, 
to be sure, — a good while after I had left it. 
I had put myself meanwhile in somewhat the 



THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 99 

position of that backsliding youth at Concord 
of whom some feminine friend said anxiously, 
"I am troubled about Eben ; he used to be a 
real Come-Outer, interested in all the reforms ; 
but now he smokes and swears and goes to 
church, and is just like any other young man." 
Yet I resolved to risk even this peril, removed 
my modest belongings to Divinity Hall, and 
bought one of those very Hebrew Bibles which 
my father had once criticised as having their 
title-pages at the wrong end. 



IV 

THE REARING OF A REFORMER 

Some years before the time when I entered 
the Harvard Divinity School, it had been de- 
scribed by the Rev. Dr. J. G. Palfrey, then its 
dean, as being made up of mystics, skeptics, 
and dyspeptics. This, being interpreted, really 
meant that the young men there assembled 
were launched on that wave of liberal thought 
which, under Emerson and Parker, was rapidly 
submerging the old landmarks. For myself, I 
was wholly given over to the newer phase of 
thought, and after a year of unchartered free- 
dom was ready to concentrate my reading a 
little and follow the few appointed lines of study 
which the school then required. The teachers 
were men quite worth knowing ; and Dr. Con- 
vers Francis, especially, had a noted library and 
as dangerous a love of miscellaneous reading as 
my own. Accordingly, during the first year I 
kept up that perilous habit, and at the end of 
this time stayed out of the school for another 
year of freedom, returning only for the neces- 
sary final terms. There had just been a large 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER loi 

accession of books at the college library, and 
from that and the Francis collection I had a full 
supply. I read Comte and Fourier, Strauss's 
"Life of Jesus" (a French translation), and 
bought by economy a fine folio copy of Cud- 
worth's " Intellectual System," on which I used 
to browse at all odd hours — keeping it open 
on a standing desk. I read Mill's " Logic," 
Whewell's "Inductive Sciences," Landor's "Ge- 
bir " and "Imaginary Conversations." Maria 
Lowell lent me also Landor's " Pentameron," a 
book with exquisite passages ; Alford's poems, 
then new, and, as she said, " valuable for 
their simplicity;" and the fiery German lays 
of Hoffmann von Fallersleben, some of which 
I translated, as was also the case with poems 
from Riickert and Freiligrath, besides making 
a beginning at a version of the Swedish epic 
*' Frithiof's Saga," which Longfellow admired, 

and of Fredrika Bremer's novel, "The H 

Family." I returned to Homer and Dante in 
the originals, and read something of Plato in 
Cousin's French translation, with an occasional 
reference to the Greek text. 

Some verses were contributed by me, as well 
as by my sister Louisa, at various times, to 
" The Harbinger," published at Brook Farm and 
edited by the late Charles A. Dana. My first 
poem, suggested by the fine copy of the Sistine 



102 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

Madonna which had been my housemate at 
BrookHne, had, however, been printed in " The 
Present," a short-Hved magazine edited by my 
cousin, Wilham Henry Channing; the verses 
being afterward, to my great delight, reprinted 
by Professor Longfellow in his "Estray." My 
first prose, also, had appeared in " The Present," 
— an enthusiastic review of Mrs. Child's " Let- 
ters from New York," then eagerly read by us 
young Transcendentalists. I dipped ardently, 
about that time, into the easier aspects of Ger- 
man philosophy, reading Fichte's "Bestimmung 
des Menschen " (Destiny of Man) with delight, 
and Schelling's "Vorlesungen iiber die Me- 
thode des Akademische Studiums " (Lectures 
on Academical Study). The influence of these 
authors was also felt through Coleridge's " Lit- 
erary Remains," of which I was very fond, and 
in "Vital Dynamics," by Dr. Green, Coleridge's 
friend and physician. A more perilous book 
was De Quincey's " Confessions of an English 
Opium-Eat er," which doubtless created more of 
such slaves than it liberated : I myself was led 
to try some guarded experiments in that direc- 
tion, which had happily no effect, and I was 
glad to abandon them. It seems, in looking 
back, a curious escapade for one who had a nat- 
ural dislike for all stimulants and narcotics and 
had felt no temptation of that kind ; I probably 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER 103 

indulged the hope of stimulating my imagina- 
tion. 

My mother and sisters having now left Cam- 
bridge, I rarely went to any house there, ex- 
cept sometimes to Lowell's, where his sweet 
wife now presided over the upper story of his 
father's large abode. She kept things as or- 
derly as she could ; always cruising like Admi- 
ral Van Tromp, Lowell said, with a broom at her 
mast-head. She had fitted the rooms with pretty 
devices, and rocked her baby in a cradle fash- 
ioned from a barrel cut lengthways, placed on 
rockers, and upholstered by herself. At its foot 
she painted three spears as the Lowell crest and 
three lilies for her own, with the motto " Puri- 
tas Potestas," This was for their first child, 
whose early death both Lowell and Longfel- 
low mourned in song. The Lowells sometimes 
saw company in a modest way, and I remember 
spending an evening there with Ole Bull and 
John Weiss. Dr. Lowell, the father, was yet 
living, always beneficent and attractive ; he still 
sometimes preached in the college chapel, and 
won all undergraduate hearts by providing only 
fifteen-minute sermons. 

If I belonged in the first two categories of 
Dr. Palfrey's classification of the Divinity 
School, I happily kept clear of the third, never 
having been a dyspeptic, though I lived literally 



104 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

on bread and milk during the greater part of 
a year, for purposes of necessary economy and 
the buying of books. I kept up habits of ac- 
tive exercise, played football and baseball, and 
swam in the river in summer. There was then 
an attention paid to the art of swimming such 
as is not now observable; the college main- 
tained large bath-houses where now are coal- 
yards, and we used to jump or dive from the 
roofs, perhaps twenty feet high ; we had a 
Danish student named Stallknecht, who could 
swim a third of the way across the river under 
water, and we vainly tried to emulate him. In 
winter there was skating on Fresh Pond. I 
must not forget to add that at all seasons I took 
long walks with Edward Tuckerman, then the 
most interesting man about Cambridge, lead- 
ing a life which seemed to us like that of an 
Oxford don, and already at work on his Latin 
treatise on lichens. His room was a delightful 
place to visit, — a large chamber in a rambling 
old house, with three separate reading-tables, 
one for botany, one for the study of Coleridge, 
and one for the Greek drama. He was the 
simplest-hearted of men, shy, near-sighted, and 
lovable ; the tragedy of whose life was that his 
cruel father had sent him to Union College 
instead of to Harvard ; a loss he made up by 
staying years at the latter, graduating succes- 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER 105 

sively at the Law School and the Divinity 
School, and finally taking his degree in the un- 
dergraduate department at what seemed to us 
a ripe old age. 

Another tonic in the way of cultured com- 
panionship was that of James Elliot Cabot, fresh 
from a German university, — then a rare expe- 
rience, — he being, however, most un-German 
in clearness and terseness. I remember that 
when I complained to him of not understanding 
Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason," in English, 
he answered tranquilly that he could not ; that 
having read it twice in German he had thought 
he comprehended it, but that Meiklejohn's trans- 
lation was beyond making out. These men 
were not in the Divinity School, but I met their 
equals there. The leading men of a college class 
gravitated then as naturally to the Divinity 
School as now to the Law School; even though, 
like myself, they passed to other pursuits after- 
ward, I met there such men as Thomas Hill, 
afterward President of Harvard ; Octavius B, 
Frothingham ; William R. Alger ; Samuel Long- 
fellow and Samuel Johnson, who compiled at 
Divinity Hall their collection of hymns, — a 
volume called modestly " A Book of Hymns," 
and more profanely named from its editors' 
familiar names "The Sam Book." Longfellow 
was one of the born saints, but with a breadth 



lo6 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

and manliness not always to be found in that 
class ; he was also a genuine poet, like his elder 
brother, whose biographer he afterward became. 
Johnson, a man of brilliant gifts and much per- 
sonal charm, is now best known by his later 
work on " Oriental Religions." It is a curi- 
ous fact that many of their youthful hymns as 
well as some of my own, appearing originally in 
this heterodox work, have long since found their 
way into the most orthodox and respectable 
collections. 

Two of the most interesting men in the Divin- 
ity School were afterward, like myself, in mil- 
itary service during the Civil War. One of 
them was James Richardson, whom Frothing- 
ham described later as "a brilliant wreath of 
fire-mist, which seemed every moment to be on 
the point of becoming a star, but never did." 
He enlisted as a private soldier and died in hos- 
pital, where he had been detailed as nurse. 
The other had been educated at West Point, 
and had served in the Florida Indian wars ; 
he was strikingly handsome and mercilessly 
opinionated ; he commanded the first regiment 
of heavy artillery raised in Massachusetts, did 
much for the defense of Washington in the 
early days of the Civil War, and resigned his 
commission when Governor Andrew refused 
to see justice done — as he thought — to one 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER 107 

of his subordinates. His name was William 
Batcheldor Greene. 

But all these companionships were wholly- 
secondary to one which was for me most mem- 
orable, and brought joy for a few years and 
sorrow for many. Going through the doors of 
Divinity Hall I met one day a young man so 
handsome in his dark beauty that he seemed 
like a picturesque Oriental ; slender, keen-eyed, 
raven-haired, he arrested the eye and the heart 
like some fascinating girl. This was William 
Hurlbert (originally Hurlbut), afterward the 
hero of successive novels, — Kingsley's " Two 
Years Ago," Winthrop's " Cecil Dreeme," and 
my own "Malbone," — as well as of actual 
events stranger than any novels. He was the 
breaker, so report said, of many hearts, the 
disappointer of many high hopes, — and this 
in two continents ; he was the most variously 
gifted and accomplished man I have ever 
known, acquiring knowledge as by magic, — 
passing easily for a Frenchman in France, an 
Italian in Italy, a Spaniard in Spanish coun- 
tries ; beginning his career as a radical young 
Unitarian divine, and ending it as a defender of 
despotism. He was also for a time a Roman 
Catholic, but died in the Church of England. 

The turning-point of Hurlbert's life occurred, 
for me at least, when I met him once, to my 



io8 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

great delight, at Centre Harbor, I being on my 
way to the White Mountains and he returning 
thence. We had several hours together, and 
went out on the lake for a long chat. He told 
me that he had decided to go to New York 
and enter the office of A. Oakey Hall, a law- 
yer against whom there was then, justly or 
unjustly, some prejudice. I expressed surprise 
and perhaps regret ; and he said frankly, " It is 
the parting of the ways with me, and I feel it 
to be necessary. I have made up my mind 
that I cannot live the simple and moderate 
life you and my other friends live in New Eng- 
land ; I must have a larger field, and more of 
the appliances and even luxuries of existence." 
This recalls what the latest biographer of Bay- 
ard Taylor has said of him : " The men of New 
England were satisfied with plain homes and 
simple living, and were content with the small 
incomes of professional life. Taylor had other 
aims. . . . Involved in the expense of Cedar- 
croft, he never knew the enormous value of 
freedom." 

There was nothing intrinsically wrong in the 
impulse of either, but the ambition brought 
failure to both, though Taylor, with the tra- 
dition of a Quaker ancestry, and with less of 
perilous personal fascination, escaped the moral 
deterioration and the social scandals which be- 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER 109 

set Hurlbert, as well as his utter renunciation 
of all his early convictions. Yet the charm 
always remained in Hurlbert's case. When 
we met at Centre Harbor, I remember, he was 
summoned from dinner on some question about 
stage arrangements ; and the moment he had 
shut the door a lady of cultivated appearance 
got up hastily from her chair and came round 
where I was sitting. She said breathlessly, 
" Can you tell me who that is ? We came here 
in the stage with him, and he has been per- 
fectly delightful. I never saw such a man : he 
knows all languages, talks upon all subjects ; 
my daughter and I cannot rest without knowing 
who he is." I did not even learn the lady's 
name, but years after I met her again, and she 
recalled the interview ; time for her had only 
confirmed the instantaneous impression which 
Hurlbert made, — the whole thing suggesting 
a similar story about Edmund Burke. 

In Burke's case it was apparently a matter 
of pure intellect, but in Hurlbert's it was due 
largely to the constitutional and invariable im- 
pulse to attract and charm. I am told — for I 
had utterly forgotten it — that I myself said of 
him in those days, " He could not stop to buy 
an apple of an old woman on the sidewalk with- 
out leaving her with the impression that she 
alone had really touched his heart." 



no CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

I have known many gifted men on both sides 
of the Atlantic, but I still regard Hurlbert 
as unequaled among them all for natural bril- 
liancy ; even Lowell was not his peer. Nor 
can I be convinced that he was — as President 
Walker once said to me, when I urged Hurl- 
bert's appointment, about 1850, as professor 
of history at Harvard — "a worthless fellow." 
Among many things which were selfish and 
unscrupulous there must have been something 
deeper to have called out the warm affection 
created by him in both sexes. I strongly sus- 
pect that if, after twenty years of non- inter- 
course, he had written to me to come and nurse 
him in illness, I should have left all and gone. 
Whatever may have been his want of moral prin- 
ciple, he certainly had the power not merely 
of inspiring affection, but of returning it. I 
know, for instance, that while borrowing money 
right and left, he never borrowed of me, — not 
that I had then much to lend ; if he helped 
himself to my books and other small matters 
as if they were his own, he was not an atom 
more chary of the possessions that were his ; 
and I recall one occasion when he left a charm- 
ing household in Boston and came out to Cam- 
bridge, in the middle of a winter vacation, on 
purpose to have a fire ready for me in my room 
on my return from a journey. I think it was 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER in 

on that very evening that he read aloud to me 
from Krummacher's " Parables," a book then 
much liked among us, — selecting that fine tale 
describing the gradual downfall of a youth of 
unbounded aspirations, which the author sums 
up with the terse conclusion, " But the name of 
that youth is not mentioned among the poets 
of Greece." It was thus with Hurlbert when 
he died, although his few poems in " Putnam's 
Magazine " — " Borodino," " Sorrento," and the 
like — seemed to us the dawn of a wholly new 
genius ; and I remember that when the cool and 
keen-sighted Whittier read his " Gan Eden," he 
said to me that one who had written that could 
write anything he pleased. Yet the name of 
the youth was not mentioned among the poets ; 
and the utter indifference with which the an- 
nouncement of his death was received was a 
tragic epitaph upon a wasted life. 

Thanks to a fortunate home training and the 
subsequent influence of Emerson and Parker, I 
held through all my theological studies a sunny 
view of the universe, which has lasted me as 
well, amid the storms of life, so far as I can 
see, as the more prescribed and conventional 
forms of faith might have done. We all, no 
doubt, had our inner conflicts, yet mine never 
related to opinions, but to those problems of 
heart and emotion which come to every young 



112 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

person, and upon which it is not needful to 
dwell. Many of my fellow students, however, 
had just broken away from a sterner faith, 
whose shattered eggshells still clung around 
them. My friend of later years, David Wasson, 
used to say that his health was ruined for life by 
two struggles : first by the way in which he got 
into the church during a revival, and then by 
the way he got out of it as a reformer. This 
I escaped, and came out in the end with the 
radical element so much stronger than the sacer- 
dotal, that I took for the title of my address 
at the graduating exercises "The Clergy and 
Reform." I remember that I had just been 
reading Home's farthing epic of Orion, and had 
an ambitious sentence in my address, compar- 
ing the spirit of the age to that fabled being, 
first blinded, and then fixing his sightless eyes 
upon the sun that they might be set free once 
more. Probably it was crude enough, but The- 
y odore Parker liked it, and so I felt as did the 
brave Xanthus, described by Landor, who only 
remembered that in the heat of the battle Peri- 
cles smiled on him. I was asked to preach 
as a candidate before the First Religious So- 
ciety at Newburyport, a church two hundred 
years old, then ostensibly of the Unitarian 
faith, but bearing no denominational name. 
Receiving a farther invitation after trial, I went 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER 113 

there to begin my professional career, if such 
it could properly be called. 

There was something very characteristic of 
my mother in a little incident which happened 
in connection with my first visit to Newbury- 
port. I had retained enough affection for the 
opinion of Boston drawing-rooms to have de- 
vised for myself a well-cut overcoat of gray 
tweed, with a cap of the same material trimmed 
with fur. My elder sisters naturally admired 
me in this garb, but implored me not to wear it 
to Newburyport. " So unclerical," they said ; 
it would ruin my prospects. " Let him wear 
it, by all means," said my wiser mother. " If 
they cannot stand that clothing, they can never 
stand its wearer." Her opinion properly pre- 
vailed ; and I was perhaps helped as much as 
hindered by this bit of lingering worldly vanity. 
The younger people expected some pleasant ad- 
mixture of heresy about me, and it might as well 
begin in this way as in any other. Henry C. 
Wright, afterward a prominent Abolitionist, had 
lost his parish, a few miles above Newburyport, 
for the alleged indecorum of swimming across 
the Merrimack River. 

My first actual proposal of innovation was in 
a less secular line, but was equally formida- 
ble. It was that I should be ordained as The- 
odore Parker had been, by the society itself: and 



114 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

this all the more because my ancestor, Francis 
Higginson, had been ordained in that way — 
the first of all New England ordinations — in 
1629. To this the society readily assented, at 
least so far as that there should be no ordain- 
ing council, and there was none. William 
Henry Channing preached one of his impas- 
sioned sermons, "The Gospel of To-Day," and 
all went joyously on, " youth at the prow and 
pleasure at the helm," not foreseeing the storms 
that were soon to gather, although any saga- 
cious observer ought easily to have predicted 
them. It must be borne in mind that during 
all this period I was growing more, not less 
radical ; my alienation from the established 
order was almost as great as that of Thoreau, 
though as yet I knew nothing of him except 
through "The Dial." 

It must be remembered that two rather dif- 
ferent elements combined to make up the so- 
called Transcendentalist body. There were the 
more refined votaries, who were indeed the 
most cultivated people of that time and place ; 
but there was also a less educated contingent, 
known popularly as " Come-Outers," — a name 
then as familiar and distinctive as is that of the 
Salvation Army to-day. These were developed 
largely by the anti-slavery movement, which 
was not, like our modern civil service reform, 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER 115 

Strongest in the more educated classes, but was 
predominantly a people's movement, based on 
the simplest human instincts, and far stronger 
for a time in the factories and shoe-shops than 
in the pulpits or colleges. The factories were 
still largely worked by American operatives, and 
the shoe manufacture was carried on in little 
shops, where the neighbors met and settled 
affairs of state, as may be read in Mr. Row- 
land Robinson's delightful stories called " Dan- 
vis Folks." Radicalism went with the smell 
of leather, and was especially active in such 
towns as Lynn and Abington, the centres of 
that trade. Even the least educated had re- 
cognized it in the form of the Second Advent 
delusion just then flourishing. All these influ- 
ences combined to make the Come-Outer ele- 
ment very noticeable, — it being fearless, dis- 
interested, and always self-asserting. It was 
abundant on Cape Cod, and the " Cape Cod- 
ders" were a recognized subdivision at reform 
meetings. In such meetings or conventions 
these untaught disciples were often a source of 
obvious inconvenience : they defied chairmen, 
scaled platforms, out-roared exhorters. Some 
of them, as Emerson says, "devoted themselves 
to the worrying of clergymen ; " proclaiming a 
gospel of freedom, I have heard them boast 
of having ascended into pulpits and trampled 



Ii6 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

across their cushions before horrified ministers. 
This was not a protest against religion, for 
they were rarely professed atheists, but against 
its perversions alone. 

It must be remembered that the visible 
church in New England was not then the prac- 
tical and reformatory body which it is to-day, 
— the change in the Episcopal Church being 
the most noticeable of all, — but that it devoted 
itself very largely to the " tithing of anise and 
cummin," as in Scripture times. Of the re- 
forms prominent before the people, nearly all 
had originated outside the pulpit and even 
among avowed atheists, Thomas Herttell, a 
judge of the Marine Court of New York city, 
who belonged to that heretical class, was the 
first person in America, apparently, to write 
and print, in 1819, a strong appeal in behalf 
of total abstinence as the only remedy for in- 
temperance ; and the same man made, in 1837, 
in the New York Assembly, the first effort to 
secure to married women the property rights 
now generally conceded. All of us were famil- 
iar with the vain efforts of Garrison to enlist 
the clergy in the anti-slavery cause ; and Ste- 
phen Foster, one of the stanchest of the early 
Abolitionists, habitually spoke of them as " the 
Brotherhood of Thieves." Lawyers and doc- 
tors, too, fared hard with those enthusiasts, and 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER 117 

merchants not much better; Edward Palmer 
writing against the use of money, and even 
such superior men as Alcott having sometimes 
a curious touch of the Harold Skimpole view of 
that convenience. It seems now rather remark- 
able that the institution of marriage did not 
come in for a share in the general laxity, but it 
did not ; and it is to be observed that Henry 
James speaks rather scornfully of the Brook 
Farm community in this respect, as if its mem- 
bers must have been wanting in the courage 
of their convictions to remain so unreasonably 
chaste. I well remember that the contrary 
was predicted and expected by cynics, and the 
utter failure of their prophecies was the best 
tribute to the essential purity of the time. It 
was, like all seething periods, at least among 
the Anglo-Saxon race, a time of high moral 
purpose ; and the anti-slavery movement, reach- 
ing its climax after the passage of the Fugitive 
Slave Law, was about to bring such qualities 
to a test. 

This agitation, at any rate, was so far the 
leader in the reforms of the day that it brought 
to a focus all their picturesque ingredients. 
There were women who sat tranquilly knitting 
through a whole anti-slavery convention, how- 
ever exciting, and who had that look of pro- 
longed and self-controlled patience which we 



Il8 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

associate with Sisters of Charity ; and others 
who bore that uplifted and joyous serenity 
which now seems a part of the discipHne of the 
Salvation lassies. There were always present 
those whom Emerson tersely classified as " men 
with beards ; " this style, now familiar, being 
then an utter novelty, not tolerated in business 
or the professions, and of itself a committal 
to pronounced heresy. Partly as a result" of 
this unwonted adornment, there were men who 
— as is indeed noticed in European Socialist 
meetings to-day — bore a marked resemblance 
to the accepted pictures of Jesus Christ. This 
trait was carried to an extent which the news- 
papers called " blasphemous " in Charles Bur- 
leigh, — a man of tall figure, benign face, and 
most persuasive tongue, wearing long auburn 
curls and somewhat tangled tempestuous beard. 
Lowell, whose own bearded condition marked 
his initiation into abolitionism, used to be 
amused when he went about with Burleigh and 
found himself jeered at as a new and still fal- 
tering disciple. F'inally, there was the Hutch- 
inson Family, with six or eight tall brothers 
clustered around the one rosebud of a sister, 
Abby : all natural singers and one might say 
actors, indeed unconscious /^J^^ri", easily arous- 
ing torpid conventions with " The Car Emanci- 
pation " and such stirring melodies ; or at times, 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER 119 

when encored, giving " The Bridge of Sighs," 
which seemed made for just the combination 
they presented. When, in this song, the circle 
of stalwart youths chanted, "Had she a sister ? " 
or when the sweet Abby, looking up with dove- 
like eyes at her guardians, sang in response, 
"Or had she a brother?" it not only told its 
own story, but called up forcibly the infinite 
wrongs of the slave girls who had no such 
protectors, and who perhaps stood at that very 
moment, exposed and shrinking, on the auction- 
block. 

On removing to Newburyport I found my- 
self at once the associate of all that was most 
reputable in the town, in virtue of my func- 
tions ; and also, by a fatality in temperament, 
of all that was most radical. There prevailed 
then a phrase, " the Sisterhood of Reforms," 
indicating a variety of social and physiological 
theories of which one was expected to accept 
all, if any. This I learned soon after my arrival, 
through the surprise expressed by some of my 
more radical friends at my unacquaintance with 
a certain family of factory operatives known 
as the " Briggs girls." "Not know the Briggs 
girls ? I should think you would certainly know 
them. Work in the Globe Mills ; interested in 
all the reforms ; bathe in cold water every 
morning ; one of 'em is a Grahamite," — mean- 



I20 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

ing a disciple of vegetarianism ; that faith being 
then a conspicuous part of " the Sisterhood of 
Reforms," but one against which I had been 
solemnly warned by William Henry Channing, 
who had made experiment of it while living as 
city missionary in New York city. He had 
gone, it seemed, to a boarding-house of the 
vegetarian faithful in the hope of finding spirit- 
ually minded associates, but was so woefully 
disappointed in the result that he left them 
after a while, falling back upon the world's 
people, as more carnal, possibly, but more com- 
panionable. 

Without a tithe of my cousin's eloquence, I 
was of a cooler temperament, and perhaps kept 
my feet more firmly on the earth or was more 
guarded in my experiments. Yet I was gradu- 
ally drawn into the temperance agitation, in- 
cluding prohibition ; the peace movement, for 
which, I dare say, I pommeled as lustUy as 
Schramm's pupils in Heine's " Reisebilder ; " 
the social reform debate, which was sustained 
for some time after the downfall of Brook 
Farm ; and of course the woman's rights move- 
ment, for whose first national convention I 
signed the call in 1850. Of all the movements 
in which I ever took part, except the anti- 
slavery agitation, this last-named seems to me 
the most important ; nor have I ever wavered 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER 121 

in the opinion announced by Wendell Phillips, 
that it is "the grandest reform yet launched 
upon the century, as involving the freedom of 
one half the human race." Certainly the anti- 
slavery movement, which was by its nature a 
more temporary one, had the right of way, and 
must first be settled ; it was, moreover, by its 
nature a much simpler movement. Once re- 
cognize the fact that man could have no right 
of property in man, and the whole affair was 
settled ; there was nothing left but to agitate, 
and if needful to fight. But as Stuart Mill 
clearly pointed out, the very fact of the closer 
relations of the sexes had complicated the affair 
with a thousand perplexities in the actual work- 
ing out ; gave room for more blunders, more 
temporary disappointments, more extravagant 
claims, and far slower development. 

It was in one respect fortunate that most of 
the early advocates of the Woman Suffrage 
reform had served previously as Abolitionists, 
for they had been thereby trained to courage 
and self-sacrifice ; but it was in other respects 
unfortunate, because they had been accustomed 
to a stern and simple " Thus saith the Lord," 
which proved less applicable to the more com- 
plex question. When it came to the point, 
the alleged aversion of the slaves to freedom al- 
ways vanished ; I never myself encountered an 



122 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

instance of it ; every man, woman, and chUd, 
whatever protestations might have been made 
to the contrary, was eager to grasp at freedom ; 
whereas in all communities there is a minority 
of women who are actively opposed to each 
successive step in elevating their condition, 
and this without counting the merely indiffer- 
ent. All the ordinary objections to woman suf- 
frage, as that women have not, in the phrase of 
old Theophilus Parsons, "a sufficient acquired 
discretion," or that they are too impulsive, or 
that they cannot fight, — all these seem to me 
trivial ; but it is necessary always to face the 
fact that this is the only great reform in which 
a minority, at least, of the very persons to be 
benefited are working actively on the other 
side. This, to my mind, only confirms its 
necessity, as showing that, as Mill says, the 
very nature of woman has been to some extent 
warped and enfeebled by prolonged subjugation, 
and must have time to recover itself. 

It was in the direction of the anti- slavery 
reform, however, that I felt the most immediate 
pricking of conscience, and it may be interest- 
ing, as a study of the period, to note what 
brought it about. There was, perhaps, some 
tendency that way in the blood, for I rejoice to 
recall the fact that after Judge Sewall, in 1700, 
had published his noted tract against slavery, 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER 123 

called "The Selling of Joseph," the first protest 
against slavery in Massachusetts, he himself tes- 
tified, six years later, "Amidst the frowns and 
hard words I have met with for this Under- 
taking, it is no small refreshment to me that I 
can have the Learned Reverend and Aged Mr. 
Higginson for my Abetter." This was my 
ancestor, the Rev. John Higginson, of Salem, 
then ninety years old ; but my own strongest 
impulse came incidentally from my mother. It 
happened that my father, in his office of stew- 
ard of the college, was also "patron," as it was 
called, having charge of the affairs of the more 
distant students, usually from the Southern 
States. This led to pleasant friendships with 
their families, and to occasional visits paid by 
my parents, traveling in their own conveyance. 
Being once driven from place to place by an 
intelligent negro driver, my mother said to him 
that she thought him very well situated, after 
all ; on which he turned and looked at her, 
simply saying, " Ah, missis ! free breath is 
good." It impressed her greatly, and she put 
it into her diary, whence my eldest brother. Dr. 
Francis John Higginson, quoted it in a little 
book he wrote, " Remarks on Slavery," pub- 
lished in 1834. This fixed it in my mind, and 
I remember to have asked my aunt why my 
uncle in Virginia did not free his slaves. She 



124 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

replied that they loved him, and would be sorry 
to be free. This did not satisfy me ; but on 
my afterward visiting the Virginia plantation, 
there was nothing to suggest anything undesir- 
able : the head servant was a grave and digni- 
fied man, with the most unexceptionable man- 
ners ; and the white and black children often 
played together in the afternoon. It was then 
illegal to teach a slave to read, but one girl was 
pointed out who had picked up a knowledge of 
reading while the white children were learn- 
ing. The slaves seemed merely to share in the 
kindly and rather slipshod methods of a South- 
ern establishment ; and my only glimpse of the 
other side was from overhearing conversation 
between the overseer and his friends, in which 
all the domestic relations of the negroes were 
spoken of precisely as if they had been animals. 
Returning to Cambridge, I found the whole 
feeling of the college strongly opposed to the 
abolition movement, as had also been that 
among my Brookline friends and kindred. My 
uncle, Mr. Samuel Perkins, had lived in Hayti 
during the insurrection, and had written an 
account of it which he gave me to read, and 
which was afterwards printed by Charles Per- 
kins in the " Proceedings of the Massachusetts 
Historical Society." He thought, and most men 
of his class firmly believed, that any step to- 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER 125 

ward emancipation would lead to instant and 
formidable insurrection. It was in this sincere 
but deluded belief that such men mobbed Gar- 
rison. When I once spoke with admiration of 
that reformer to Mr. Augustus Aspinwall, a 
frequent guest at my uncle's house, he replied 
with perfect gentleness, sipping his wine, "It 
may be as you say. I never saw him, but I 
always supposed him to be a fellow who ought 
to be hung." Mr. Aspinwall was a beautiful 
old man, who cultivated the finest roses to be 
found near Boston ; he had the most placid 
voice, the sweetest courtesy, and the most 
adamantine opinions, — the kind of man who 
might have been shot in the doorway of his own 
chateau during the French Revolution. If it 
had come in his way, he would undoubtedly 
have seen Garrison executed, and would then 
have gone back to finish clearing his roses of 
snails and rose-beetles. The early history of 
the anti-slavery agitation cannot possibly be un- 
derstood unless we comprehend this class of 
men who then ruled Boston opinion. 

I know of no book except the last two vol- 
umes of Pierce's "Life of Charles Sumner" 
which fully does justice to the way in which 
the anti-slavery movement drew a line of cleav- 
age through all Boston society, leaving most 
of the more powerful or wealthy families on the 



126 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

conservative side. What finally determined me 
in the other direction was the immediate influ- 
ence of two books, both by women. One of 
these was Miss Martineau's tract, " The Martyr 
Age in America," portraying the work of the 
Abolitionists with such force and eloquence 
that it seemed as if no generous youth could 
be happy in any other company ; and the other 
book was Mrs. Lydia Maria Child's " Appeal 
for that Class of Americans called Africans." 
This little work, for all its cumbrous title, was 
so wonderfully clear, compact, and convincing, 
it covered all its points so well and was so ab- 
solutely free from all unfairness or shrill invec- 
tive, that it joined with Miss Martineau's less 
modulated strains to make me an Abolitionist. 
This was, it must be remembered, some years 
before the publication of " Uncle Tom's Cabin." 
I longed to be counted worthy of such com- 
panionship ; I wrote and printed a rather crude 
sonnet to Garrison ; and my only sorrow was 
in feeling that, as Alexander lamented about 
his father Philip's conquests, nothing had been 
left for me to do. Fortunately, Lowell had 
already gone far in the same direction, under 
the influence of his wife ; and her brother Wil- 
liam, moreover, who had been for a time my 
schoolmate, had left all and devoted himself to 
anti-slavery lecturing. He it was who, when 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER 127 

on a tour with Frederick Douglass at the West, 
was entertained with him at a house where 
there was but one spare bed. To some apolo- 
gies by the hostess the ever ready and imperial 
Douglass answered, with superb dignity, " Do 
not apologize, madam ; I have not the slightest 
prejudice against color." 

This was the condition of things then prevail- 
ing around Boston ; and when I went to live 
in Newburyport the same point of view soon 
presented itself in another form. The parish, 
which at first welcomed me, counted among its 
strongest supporters a group of retired sea-cap- 
tains who had traded with Charleston and New 
Orleans, and more than one of whom had found 
himself obliged, after sailing from a Southern 
port, to put back in order to eject some runa- 
way slave from his lower hold. All their pre- 
judices ran in one direction, and their view of 
the case differed from that of Boston society 
only as a rope's end differs from a rapier. One 
of them, perhaps the quietest, was the very 
Francis Todd who had caused the imprison- 
ment of Garrison at Baltimore. It happened, 
besides, that the one political hero and favorite 
son of Newburyport, Caleb Cushing — for of 
Garrison himself they only felt ashamed — was 
at that moment fighting slavery's battles in the 
Mexican war. It now seems to me strange 



128 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

that, under all these circumstances, I held my 
place for two years and a half. Of course it 
cannot be claimed that I showed unvarying tact ; 
indeed, I can now see that it was quite other- 
wise; but it was a case where tact counted for 
little ; in fact, I think my sea-captains did not 
wholly dislike my plainness of speech, though 
they felt bound to discipline it ; and moreover 
the whole younger community was on my side. 
It did not help the matter that I let myself 
be nominated for Congress by the new " Free 
Soil " party in 1 848, and " stumped the dis- 
trict," though in a hopeless minority. The 
nomination was Whittier's doing, partly to pre- 
vent that party from nominating him ; and he 
agreed that, by way of reprieve, I should go to 
Lowell and induce Josiah G. Abbott, then a 
young lawyer, to stand in my place. Abbott's 
objection is worth recording : if elected, he 
said, he should immediately get into quarrels 
with the Southern members and have to fight 
duels, and this he could not conscientiously do. 
This was his ground of exemption. Years 
after, when he was an eminent judge in Boston 
and a very conservative Democrat, I once re- 
minded him of this talk, and he said, " I should 
feel just the same now," 

Having been, of course, defeated for Con- 
gress, as I had simply stood in a gap, I lived in 



THE REARING OF A REFORMER 129 

Newburyport for more than two years longer, 
after giving up my parish. This time was 
spent in writing for newspapers, teaching pri- 
vate classes in different studies, serving on the 
school committee and organizing public evening 
schools, then a great novelty. The place was, 
and is, a manufacturing town, and I had a large 
and intelligent class of factory girls, mostly 
American, who came to my house for reading 
and study once a week. In this work I en- 
listed a set of young maidens of unusual ability, 
several of whom were afterward well known 
to the world : Harriet Prescott, afterward Mrs. 
Spofford ; Louisa Stone, afterward Mrs. Hop- 
kins (well known for her educational writings) ; 
Jane Andrews (author of " The Seven Little 
Sisters," a book which has been translated into 
Chinese and Japanese) ; her sister Caroline, 
afterward Mrs. Rufus Leighton (author of 
"Life at Puget Sound,") and others not their 
inferiors, though their names were not to be 
found in print. I have never encountered else- 
where so noteworthy a group of young women, 
and all that period of work is a delightful 
reminiscence. My youthful coadjutors had 
been trained in a remarkably good school, the 
Putnam Free School, kept by William H. 
Wells, a celebrated teacher; and I had his 
hearty cooperation, and also that of Professor 



I30 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

Alpheus Crosby, one of the best scholars in 
New England, and then resident in Newbury- 
port. With his aid I established a series of 
prizes for the best prose and poetry written by 
the young people of the town ; and the first 
evidence given of the unusual talents of Harriet 
Prescott Spofford was in a very daring and ori- 
ginal essay on Hamlet, written at sixteen, and 
gaining the first prize, I had also to do with 
the courses of lectures and concerts, and super- 
intended the annual Floral Processions which 
were then a pretty feature of the Fourth of 
July in Essex County. On the whole, per- 
haps, I was as acceptable a citizen of the town 
as could be reasonably expected of one who 
had preached himself out of his pulpit. 

I supposed myself to have given up preach- 
ing forever, and recalled the experience of my 
ancestor, the Puritan divine, Francis Higgin- 
son, who, when he had left his church-living at 
Leicester, England, in 1620, continued to lecture 
to all comers. But a new sphere of reform- 
atory action opened for me in an invitation 
to take charge of the Worcester Free Church, 
the first of several such organizations that 
sprang up about that time under the influence 
of Theodore Parker's Boston society, which was 
their prototype. These organizations were all 
more or less of the " Jerusalem wildcat " de- 



THE REARING OF A F.ZFORMER 131 

scrif^jsm — this being the phrase by vfaidi a 
Ljnm shoemaker described one of them — with 
no church membeniap or commmiicm serrice, 
not calling themselves specifically Christian, 
bat resembling the ethical societies ci the pre- 
sent day, with a ^^ade more of specificalfy rdi- 
gioos aspect W<R€ester was at that time a 
seething centre oi all the reforms, and I foood 
mjTseif almost in fashion, at least with the mi- 
fashionable; my evening congr^;atkms were 
the largest in the city, and the men and women 
who snrromided me — now almost all passed 
aw^ — were leaders in paUic movements in 
that growing commnnity. Before my transfer, 
howevCT, I went up to Bostcm on my first fugi- 
tive slave foray, as it might be called, — not tbe 
Anthony Bums affair, but the Thmnas Sims 
case, which preceded it, and which was to teach 
me, once for all, that thCTe was plenty left to 
be done, and that Fhilq> had not fought all the 
battles. 



V 

THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 

' " I canna think the preacher himself wad be heading the mob, 
tho' the time has been they have been as forward in a bruilzie as 
their neighbors." — Scott's The Heart of Mid-Lothian. 

Nothing did more to strengthen my anti- 
slavery zeal, about 1848, than the frequent in- 
tercourse with Whittier and his household, 
made possible by their nearness to Newbury- 
port. It was but a short walk or drive of a few 
miles from my residence to his home ; or, better 
still, it implied a sail or row up the beautiful 
river, passing beneath the suspension bridge at 
Deer Island, to where the woods called "The 
Laurels " spread themselves on one side, and 
the twin villages of Salisbury and Amesbury 
on the other. There was something delightful 
in the position of the poet among the village 
people : he was their pride and their joy, yet 
he lived as simply as any one, was careful and 
abstemious, reticent rather than exuberant in 
manner, and met them wholly on matter-of-fact 
ground. He could sit on a barrel and discuss the 
affairs of the day with the people who came to 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 133 

the " store," but he did not read them his verses. 
I was once expressing regrets for his ill health, 
in talking with one of the leading citizens of 
Amesbury, and found that my companion could 
not agree with me ; he thought that Whittier's 
ill health had helped him in the end, for it had 
"kept him from engaging in business," and had 
led him to writing poetry, which had given him 
reputation outside of the town. That poetry 
was anything but a second choice, perhaps a ne- 
cessary evil, did not seem to have occurred to 
my informant. Had he himself lost his health 
and been unable to sell groceries, who knows 
but he too might have taken up with the Muses .-' 
It suggested the Edinburgh citizen who thought 
that Sir Walter Scott might have been " sic a 
respectable mon " had he stuck to his original 
trade of law advocate. 

To me, who sought Whittier for his poetry 
as well as his politics, nothing could have been 
more delightful than his plain abode with its 
exquisite Quaker neatness. His placid mother, 
rejoicing in her two gifted children, presided 
with few words at the hospitable board whose 
tablecloth and napkins rivaled her soul in white- 
ness ; and with her was the brilliant " Lizzie," 
so absolutely the reverse, or complement, of 
her brother that they seemed between them to 
make one soul. She was as plain in feature as 



134 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

he was handsome, except that she had a pair of 
great luminous dark eyes, always flashing with 
fun or soft with emotion, and often changing with 
lightning rapidity from one expression to an- 
other ; her nose was large and aquiline, while his 
was almost Grecian, and she had odd motions of 
the head, so that her glances seemed shot at you, 
like sudden javelins, from each side of a promi- 
nent outwork. Her complexion was sallow, not 
rich brunette like his ; and whereas he spoke 
seldom and with some difficulty, her gay rail- 
lery was unceasing, and was enjoyed by him as 
much as by anybody, so that he really appeared 
to have transferred to her the expression of his 
own opinions. The lively utterances thus came 
with double force upon the auditor, and he 
could not fail to go out strengthened and stim- 
ulated. Sometimes the Whittiers had guests ; 
and " Lizzie " delighted to tell how their mother 
was once met at the door by two plump maidens 
who announced that they had come from Ohio 
mainly to see her son. She explained that he 
was in Boston. No matter ; they would come 
in and await his return. But he might be 
away a week. No matter ; they would willingly 
wait that time for such a pleasure. So in they 
came. They proved to be Alice and Phoebe 
Cary, whose earlier poems, which had already 
preceded them, were filled with dirges and de- 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 135 

spair ; but they were the merriest of house- 
mates, and as the poet luckily returned next 
day, they stayed as long as they pleased, and 
were welcome. 

The invigorating influence of the Whittier 
household supplied the tonic needed in those 
trying days. The Fugitive Slave Law had 
just passed, and a year or two after Garrison 
had proudly showed a row of escaped negroes 
sitting on the platform of an anti-slavery con- 
vention, and had defied the whole South to 
reclaim them, these v6ry m^n were fleeing 
to Canada for their lives. When the storm 
first broke, on February 15, 185 1, in the arrest 
of Shadrach, Boston had a considerable col- 
ored population, which handled his rescue with 
such unexpected skill and daring that it almost 
seemed as if Garrison were right ; yet it took 
but a few days for their whole force to be scat- 
tered to the winds. The exact story of the Sha- 
drach rescue has never been written. The 
account which appears most probable is that 
on the day of the arraignment of the alleged 
fugitive, the fact was noted in a newspaper by 
a colored man of great energy and character, 
employed by a firm in Boston and utterly un- 
connected with the Abolitionists. He asked 
leave of absence, and strolled into the Court- 
House. Many colored men were at the door and 



136 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

had been excluded ; but he, being known and 
trusted, was admitted, and the others, making a 
rush, followed in behind him with a hubbub of 
joking and laughter. There were but a few 
constables on duty, and it suddenly struck this 
leader, as he and his followers passed near the 
man under arrest, that they might as well keep 
on and pass out at the opposite door, taking 
among them the man under arrest, who was 
not handcuffed. After a moment's beckoning 
the prisoner saw his opportunity, fell in with 
the jubilant procession, and amid continued up- 
roar was got outside the Court-House, when the 
crowd scattered in all directions. 

It was an exploit which, as has been well 
said, would hardly have furnished a press item 
had it been the case of a pickpocket, yet was 
treated at Washington as if it had shaken the 
nation. Daniel Webster called it " a case of 
treason ; " President Fillmore issued a special 
proclamation ; and Henry Clay gave notice of 
a bill to lend added strength to the Fugitive 
Slave Law, so as to settle the question " whether 
the government of white men is to be yielded 
to a government of blacks." More curious 
even than this was the development of anti- 
slavery ethics that followed. The late Rich- 
ard H. Dana, the counsel for various persons 
arrested as accomplices in the rescue of Sha- 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 137 

drach, used to tell with delight this tale of a 
juryman impaneled on that trial. To Dana's 
great surprise, the jury had disagreed concern- 
ing one client who had been charged with aid- 
ing in the affair and whose conviction he had 
fully expected ; and this surprise was all the 
greater because new and especial oaths had been 
administered to the jurymen, pledging them to 
have no conscientious scruples against convict- 
ing, so that it seemed as if every one with a 
particle of anti- slavery sympathy must have 
been ruled out. Years after, Dana encountered 
by accident the very juryman — a Concord 
blacksmith — whose obstinacy had saved his 
client ; and learned that this man's unalterable 
reason for refusing to condemn was that he 
himself had taken a hand in the affair, inasmuch 
as he had driven Shadrach, after his rescue, 
from Concord to Sudbury. ^ 

I fear I must admit that while it would have 
been a great pleasure to me to have lent a 
hand in the Shadrach affair, the feeling did not 
come wholly from moral conviction, but from an 

1 See Adams's Life of Dana, i. 217. The story there is re- 
lated from Mr. Adams's recollection, which differs in several 
respects from my own, as to the way in which Dana used to 
tell it. Possibly, as with other good raconteurs, the details 
may have varied a little as time went on. I write with 
two MS. narratives before me, both from well-known Con- 
cord men. 



138 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

impulse perhaps hereditary in the blood. Prob- 
ably I got from my two soldier and sailor grand- 
fathers an intrinsic love of adventure which 
haunted me in childhood, and which three- 
score and fourteen years have by no means 
worn out. So far as I can now analyze it, this 
early emotion was not created by the wish for 
praise alone, but was mainly a boyish desire for 
a stirring experience. No man so much excited 
my envy during my whole college life as did a 
reckless Southern law student, named Winfield 
Scott Belton, who, when the old Vassall House 
in Cambridge was all in flames, and the fire- 
men could not reach the upper story with their 
ladders, suddenly appeared from within at an 
attic window, amid the smoke, and pointed out 
to them the way to follow. Like most boys, 
I had a passion for fires ; but after this the tro- 
phies of Belton would not suffer me to sleep, 
and I often ran miles towards a light in the hori- 
zon. But the great opportunity never occurs 
twice, and the nearest I ever came to it was in 
being one of several undergraduates to bring 
the elder Professor Henry Ware out of his 
burning house. It was not much of a feat, — 
we afterwards risked ourselves a great deal 
more to bring some trays of pickle-jars from 
the cellar, — but in the case of the venerable 
doctor the object was certainly worth all it cost 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 139 

US ; for he was the progenitor of that admirable 
race upon which, as Dr. Holmes said to Pro- 
fessor Stowe, the fall of Adam had not left the 
slightest visible impression. 

This combination of motives was quite 
enough to make me wish that if there should 
be another fugitive slave case I might at least 
be there to see, and, joining the Vigilance Com- 
mittee in Boston, I waited for such an occa- 
sion. It was not necessary to wait long, for 
the Shadrach case was soon to be followed by 
another. One day in April, 185 1, a messen- 
ger came to my house in Newburyport and 
said briefly, " Another fugitive slave is arrested 
in Boston, and they wish you to come." I 
went back with him that afternoon, and found 
the Vigilance Committee in session in the 
" Liberator " office. It is impossible to conceive 
of a set of men, personally admirable, yet less 
fitted on the whole than this committee to un- 
dertake any positive action in the direction of 
forcible resistance to authorities. In the first 
place, half of them were non-resistants, as was 
their great leader. Garrison, who stood com- 
posedly by his desk preparing his next week's 
editorial, and almost exasperating the more hot- 
headed among us by the placid way in which 
he looked beyond the rescue of an individual to 
the purifying of a nation. On the other hand, 



140 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

the "political Abolitionists," or Free-Soilers, 
while personally full of indignation, were ex- 
tremely anxious not to be placed for one mo- 
ment outside the pale of good citizenship. The 
only persons to be relied upon for action were 
a few whose temperament prevailed over the 
restrictions of non-resistance on the one side, 
and of politics on the other ; but of course 
their discussion was constantly damped by the 
attitude of the rest. All this would not, how- 
ever, apply to the negroes, it might well seem ; 
they had just proved their mettle, and would 
doubtless do it again. On my saying this in 
the meeting, Lewis Hayden, the leading negro 
in Boston, nodded cordially and said, "Of 
course they will." Soon after, drawing me 
aside, he startled me by adding, " I said that 
for bluff, you know. We do not wish any one 
to know how really weak we are. Practically 
there are no colored men in Boston ; the Sha- 
drach prosecutions have scattered them all. 
What is to be done must be done without 
them." Here was a blow indeed ! 

What was to be done .? The next day showed 
that absolutely nothing could be accomplished 
in the court-room. There were one or two 
hundred armed policemen in and around the 
Court-House. Only authorized persons could 
get within ten feet of the building. Chains 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 141 

were placed across the doors, and beneath these 
even the judges, entering, had to stoop. The 
United States court-room was up two high and 
narrow flights of stairs. Six men were at the 
door of the court-room. The prisoner, a slender 
boy of seventeen, sat with two strong men on 
each side and five more in the seat behind him, 
while none but his counsel could approach him 
in front. (All this I take from notes made at 
the time.) The curious thing was that although 
there was a state law of 1843 prohibiting every 
Massachusetts official from taking any part in 
the restoration of a fugitive slave, yet nearly 
all these employees were Boston policemen, act- 
ing, so the city marshal told me, under orders 
from the mayor and aldermen. Under these 
circumstances there was clearly nothing to be 
done at the trial itself. And yet all sorts of 
fantastic and desperate projects crossed the 
minds of those few among us who really, so to 
speak, meant business. I remember consult- 
ing Ellis Gray Loring, the most eminent lawyer 
among the Abolitionists, as to the possibility 
of at least gaining time by making away with 
the official record from the Southern court, a 
document which lay invitingly at one time 
among lawyers' papers on the table. Again, I 
wrote a letter to my schoolmate Charles Devens, 
the United States marshal, imploring him to 



142 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

resign rather than be the instrument of send- 
ing a man into bondage, — a thing actually- 
done by one of the leading Boston policemen. 
It is needless to say to those who knew him 
that he answered courteously and that he re- 
served his decision. No other chance opening, 
it seemed necessary to turn all attention to an 
actual rescue of the prisoner from his place of 
confinement. Like Shadrach, Thomas Sims was 
not merely tried in the United States Court- 
House, but imprisoned there, because the state 
jail was not opened to him ; he not having been 
arrested under any state law, and the United 
States having no jail in Boston. In the previ- 
ous case, an effort had been made to obtain 
permission to confine the fugitive slave at the 
Navy Yard, but Commodore Downes had re- 
fused. Sims, therefore, like Shadrach, was kept 
at the Court-House. Was it possible to get him 
out.? 

There was on Tuesday evening a crowded 
meeting at Tremont Temple, at which Horace 
Mann presided. I hoped strongly that some 
result might come from this meeting, and made 
a vehement speech there myself, which, as Dr. 
Samuel Gridley Howe honored me by saying, ' 
was bringing the community to the verge of 
revolution, when a lawyer named Charles Mayo 
Ellis protested against its tone, and threw cold 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 143 

water upon all action. It was evident that if 
anything was done, it must be done by a very 
few. I looked round, during the meeting, for 
a band of twenty-five men from Marlborough, 
who had seemed to me to show more fighting 
quality than the rest, but they had probably 
gone home. Under this conviction half a dozen 
of us formed the following plan. The room 
where Sims was confined, being safe by reason 
of its height from the ground, had no gratings 
at the windows. The colored clergyman of 
Boston, Mr. Grimes, who alone had the opportu- 
nity to visit Sims, agreed to arrange with him 
that at a specified hour that evening he should 
go to a certain window, as if for air, — for he 
had the freedom of the room, — and should 
spring out on mattresses which we were to 
bring from a lawyer's office across the way; 
we also providing a carriage in which to place 
him. All was arranged, — the message sent, 
the mattresses ready, the carriage engaged as 
if for an ordinary purpose ; and behold ! in the 
dusk of that evening, two of us, strolling through 
Court Square, saw men busily at work fitting 
iron bars across this safe third-story window. 
Whether we had been betrayed, or whether it 
was simply a bit of extraordinary precaution, 
we never knew. Colonel Montgomery, an ex- 
perienced guerrilla in Kansas, used to say, "It 



144 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

is always best to take for granted that your 
opponent is at least as smart as you yourself 
are." This, evidently, we had not done. 

I knew that there was now no chance of the 
rescue of Sims. The only other plan that had 
been suggested was that we should charter a 
vessel, place it in charge of Austin Bearse, a 
Cape Cod sea-captain and one of our best men, 
and take possession of the brig Acorn, on 
which Sims was expected to be placed. This 
project was discussed at a small meeting in 
Theodore Parker's study, and was laid aside as 
impracticable, not because it was piracy, but 
because there was no absolute certainty that 
the fugitive would be sent South in that pre- 
cise way. As no other plan suggested itself, 
and as I had no wish to look on, with my hands 
tied, at the surrender, I went back to my home 
in deep chagrin. The following extract from a 
journal written soon after is worth preserving 
as an illustration of that curious period : — 

"It left me with the strongest impressions 
of the great want of preparation, on our part, 
for this revolutionary work. Brought up as 
we have all been, it takes the whole experience 
of one such case to educate the mind to the 
attitude of revolution. It is so strange to find 
one's self outside of established institutions ; 
to be oblioced to lower one's voice and conceal 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 145 

one's purposes ; to see law and order, police 
and military, on the wrong side, and find good 
citizenship a sin and bad citizenship a duty, 
that it takes time to prepare one to act coolly 
and wisely, as well as courageously, in such an 
emergency. Especially this is true among 
reformers, who are not accustomed to act ac- 
cording to fixed rules and observances, but to 
strive to do what seems to themselves best, 
without reference to others. The Vigilance 
Committee meetings were a disorderly conven- 
tion, each man having his own plan or theory, 
perhaps stopping even for anecdote or disqui- 
sition, when the occasion required the utmost 
promptness of decision and the most unflinch- 
ing unity in action. . . . Our most reliable men 
were non-resistants, and some who were other- 
wise were the intensest visionaries. Wendell 
Phillips was calm and strong throughout ; I 
never saw a finer gleam in his eyes than when 
drawing up that stirring handbill at the anti- 
slavery office." 

During the months which followed, I at- 
tended anti-slavery conventions ; wrote editori- 
ally for the newly established " Commonwealth," 
the Boston organ of the Free Soil party ; and 
had also a daily " Independent Column " of my 
own in the "Newburyport Union," a liberal 
Democratic paper. No other fugitive slave 



146 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

case occurred in New England for three years. 
The mere cost in money of Sims' s surrender 
had been vast ; the political results had been 
the opposite of what was intended, for the elec- 
tion of Charles Sumner to the United States 
Senate practically followed from it. The whole 
anti-slavery feeling at the North was obviously 
growing stronger, yet there seemed a period 
of inaction all round, or of reliance on ordi- 
nary political methods in the contest. In 1852 I 
removed to Worcester, into a strong anti-slavery 
community of which my "Free Church" was 
an important factor. Fugitives came some- 
times to the city, and I have driven them at 
midnight to the farm of the veteran Abolition- 
ists, Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster, in the 
suburbs of the city. Perhaps the most curious 
case with which we had to deal was that of a 
pretty young woman, apparently white, with 
two perfectly white children, all being con- 
signed to me by the Rev. Samuel May, then 
secretary of the Boston Anti-Slavery Society, 
and placed by him, for promptness of trans- 
portation to Worcester, under the escort of a 
Worcester merchant, thoroughly pro-slavery in 
sympathy, and not having the slightest concep- 
tion that he was violating the laws in finding a 
seat for his charge and holding the baby on his 
knee. We had them in our care all winter. 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 147 

It was one of those cases of romantic incident 
which slavery yielded. She was the daughter 
of her former master, and was the mistress of 
her present owner, her half-brother ; she could 
scarcely read and write, but was perfectly lady- 
like, modest, and grateful. She finally married 
a tradesman near Boston, who knew her story, 
and she disappeared in the mass of white popu- 
lation, where we were content to leave her 
untraced. 

All this minor anti-slavery work ended when, 
on Thursday evening, May 25, 1854, I had a 
letter by private messenger from the same 
Samuel May just mentioned, saying that a 
slave had been arrested, and the case was to 
be heard on Saturday morning ; that a meet- 
ing was to be held on Friday evening at Fan- 
euil Hall, and it was important that Worcester 
should be well represented, Mr. A. B. Alcott 
also came thither on the same errand. I sent 
messages to several persons, and especially to 
a man of rem.arkable energy, named Martin 
Stowell, who had taken part in a slave rescue 
at Syracuse, New York, urging them to follow 
at once. Going to Boston on the morning 
train, I found myself presently in a meeting of 
the Vigilance Committee, not essentially dif- 
ferent from those which had proved so disap- 
pointing three years before. There was not 



148 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

only no plan of action, but no set purpose of 
united action. This can be imagined when I 
say that at one moment when there seemed 
a slight prospect of practical agreement, some 
one came in to announce that Suttle and his 
men, the slave-catchers, were soon to pass by, 
and proposed that we should go out and gaze 
at them, "pointing the finger of scorn," — as if 
Southern slave-catchers were to be combated 
by such weapons. This, however, had an effect 
in so far that the general committee adjourned, 
letting those alone remain who were willing to 
act personally in forcible resistance. This re- 
duced our sixty down to thirty, of whom I was 
chosen chairman. Dr. Howe was then called 
on to speak, and gave some general advice, 
very good and spirited. Two things were re- 
solved on, — to secure the names of those will- 
ing to act, and to have definite leadership. 
One leader would have been best, but we had 
not quite reached that point, so an executive 
committee of six was chosen at last, — Phillips, 
Parker, Howe, Kemp (an energetic Irishman), 
Captain Bearse, and myself ; Stowell was added 
to these at my request. Even then it was in- 
conceivably difficult to get the names of as 
many as twenty who would organize and obey 
orders. The meeting adjourned till afternoon, 
when matters were yet worse, — mere talk and 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 149 

discussion ; but it seemed to me, at least, that 
something must be done ; better a failure than 
to acquiesce tamely as before, and see Massa- 
chusetts henceforward made a hunting-ground 
for fugitive slaves. 

All hopes now rested on Stowell, who was 
to arrive from Worcester at six p. m. I met 
him at the train, and walked up with him. He 
heard the condition of affairs, and at once sug- 
gested a new plan as the only thing feasible. 
The man must be taken from the Court-House. 
It could not be done in cold blood, but the 
effort must have behind it the momentum of 
a public meeting, such as was to be held at 
Faneuil Hall that night. An attack at the 
end of the meeting would be hopeless, for 
the United States marshal would undoubtedly 
be looking for just that attempt, and" would be 
reinforced accordingly ; this being, as we after- 
wards found, precisely what that official was 
planning. Could there not be an attack at the 
very height of the meeting, brought about in 
this way .-' Let all be in readiness ; let a picked 
body be distributed near the Court House and 
Square; then send some loud-voiced speaker, 
who should appear in the gallery of Faneuil 
Hall and announce that there was a mob of 
negroes already attacking the Court - House ; 
let a speaker, previously warned, — Phillips, 



ISO CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

if possible, — accept the opportunity promptly, 
and send the whole meeting pell-mell to Court 
Square, ready to fall in behind the leaders and 
bring out the slave. The project struck me 
as an inspiration. I accepted it heartily, and 
think now, as I thought then, that it was one of 
the very best plots that ever — failed. " Good 
plot, good friends, and full of expectation." 
Why it came within an inch of success and 
still faUed will next be explained. 

The first thing to be done — after providing 
a box of axes for attack on the Court-House 
doors, a thing which I personally superintended 

— was to lay the whole matter before the com- 
mittee already appointed and get its concur- 
rence. This committee was to meet in the 
ante-room of Faneuil Hall before the general 
meeting. As a matter of fact it never came 
together, for everybody was pushing straight 
into the hall. The moments passed rapidly. 
We caught first one member of the committee, 
then another, and expounded the plot. Some 
approved, others disapproved ; our stout sea- 
captain, Bearse, distrusting anything to be at- 
tempted on land, utterly declining all part in it. 
Howe and Parker gave a hasty approval, and — 
only half comprehending, as it afterwards proved 

— were warned to be ready to give indorsement 
from the platform ; Phillips it was impossible 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 151 

to find, but we sent urgent messages, which 
never reached him ; Kemp stood by us : and 
we had thus a clear majority of the committee, 
which although it had been collectively opposed 
to the earlier plan of an attack at the end of 
the meeting, was yet now committed to a move- 
ment half way through, by way of surprise. 
We at once found our gallery orator in the late 
John L. Swift, a young man full of zeal, with 
a stentorian voice, afterwards exercised stoutly 
for many years in Republican and temperance 
meetings. He having pledged himself tor make 
the proposed announcement, it was only ne- 
cessary to provide a nucleus of picked men to 
head the attack. Stowell, Kemp, and I were 
each to furnish five of these, and Lewis Hay- 
den, the colored leader, agreed to supply ten 
negroes. So far all seemed ready, and the men 
were found as well as the general confusion 
permitted ; but the very success and over- 
whelming numbers of the Faneuil Hall meeting 
soon became a formidable obstacle instead of 
a help. 

It was the largest gathering I ever saw in 
that hall. The platform was covered with 
men ; the galleries, the floor, even the outer 
stairways, were absolutely filled with a solid 
audience. Some came to sympathize, more to 
look on, — we could not estimate the propor- 



152 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

tion ; but when the speaking was once begun, 
we could no more communicate with the plat- 
form than if the Atlantic Ocean rolled between. 
There was then no private entrance to it, such 
as now exists, and in this seemingly slight 
architectural difference lay the failure of the 
whole enterprise, as will be presently seen. 

Those of us who had been told off to be 
ready in Court Square went there singly, not 
to attract attention. No sign of motion or life 
was there, though the lights gleamed from 
many windows, for it happened — a bit of un- 
looked-for good fortune — that the Supreme 
Court was holding an evening session, and 
ordinary visitors could pass freely. Planting 
myself near a door which stood ajar, on the 
east side of the building, I waited for the trap 
to be sprung, and for the mob of people to 
appear from Faneuil Hall. The moments 
seemed endless. Would our friends never ar- 
rive ? Presently a rush of running figures, like 
the sweep of a wave, came round the corner 
of Court Square, and I watched it with such 
breathless anxiety as I have experienced only 
twice or thrice in life. The crowd ran on pell- 
mell, and I scanned it for a familiar face, A 
single glance brought the conviction of fail- 
ure and disappointment. We had the froth 
and scum of the meeting, the fringe of idlers 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 153 

on its edge. The men on the platform, the 
real nucleus of that great gathering, were far 
in the rear, perhaps were still clogged in the 
hall. Still, I stood, with assumed carelessness, 
by the entrance, when an official ran up from 
the basement, looked me in the face, ran in, 
and locked the door. There was no object in 
preventing him, since there was as yet no vis- 
ible reinforcement of friends. Mingling with 
the crowd, I ran against Stowell, who had been 
looking for the axes, stored at a friend's office 
in Court Square. He whispered, " Some of 
our men are bringing a beam up to the west 
door, the one that gives entrance to the upper 
stairway." Instantly he and I ran round and 
grasped the beam ; I finding myself at the head, 
with a stout negro opposite me. The real at- 
tack had begun. 

What followed was too hurried and confusing 
to be described with perfect accuracy of de- 
tail, although the main facts stand out vividly 
enough. Taking the joist up the steps, we 
hammered away at the southwest door of the 
Court-House. It could not have been many 
minutes before it began to give way, was then 
secured again, then swung ajar, and rested 
heavily, one hinge having parted. There was 
room for but one to pass in. I glanced in- 
stinctively at my black ally. He did not even 



154 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

look at me, but sprang in first, I following. In 
later years the experience was of inestimable 
value to me, for it removed once for all every 
doubt of the intrinsic courage of the blacks. 
We found ourselves inside, face to face with 
six or eight policemen, who laid about them 
with their clubs, driving us to the wall and 
hammering away at our heads. Often as I had 
heard of clubbing, I had never before known 
just how it felt, and to my surprise it was not 
half so bad as I expected. I was unarmed, 
but had taken boxing lessons at several differ- 
ent times, and perhaps felt, like Dr. Holmes's 
young man named John, that I had "a new 
way of counterin' I wanted to try ; " but hands 
were powerless against clubs, although my 
burly comrade wielded his lustily. All we 
could expect was to be a sort of clumsy Arnold 
Winkelrieds and " make way for liberty." All 
other thought was merged in this, the expecta- 
tion of reinforcements. I did not know that I 
had received a severe cut on the chin, whose 
scar I yet carry, though still ignorant how it 
came. Nor did I know till next morning, what 
had a more important bearing on the seeming 
backwardness of my supposed comrades, that, 
just as the door sprang open, a shot had been 
fired, and one of the marshal's deputies, a man 
named Batchelder, had fallen dead. 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 155 

There had been other fugitive slave rescues 
in different parts of the country, but this was 
the first drop of blood actually shed. In all 
the long procession of events which led the 
nation through the Kansas struggle, past the 
John Brown foray, and up to the Emancipation 
Proclamation, the killing of Batchelder was the 
first act of violence. It was, like the firing on 
Fort Sumter, a proof that war had really begun. 
The mob outside was daunted by the event, 
the marshal's posse inside was frightened, and 
what should have been the signal of success 
brought, on the contrary, a cessation of hostil- 
ities. The theory at the time was that the man 
had been stabbed by a knife, thrust through the 
broken panel. The coroner's inquest found it 
to be so, and the press, almost as active as 
now, yet no more accurate, soon got so far as to 
describe the weapon, — a Malay kris, said to 
have been actually picked up in the street. For 
years I supposed all this to be true, and conjec- 
tured that either my negro comrade did the 
deed, or else Lewis Hayden, who was just be- 
hind him.i Naturally, we never exchanged a 

1 Lewis Hayden apparently fired a shot in my defense, 
after entrance had been made, but this was doubtless after the 
death of Batchelder ; and the bullet or slug was said to have 
passed between the arm and body of Marshal Freeman. 
When Theodore Parker heard this statement, he wrung his 
hands and said, " Why did he not hit him ? " 



156 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

word on the subject, as it was a serious matter ; 
and it was not till within a few years (1888) 
that it was claimed by a well-known journal- 
ist, the late Thomas Drew, that it was Martin 
Stowell who shot, not stabbed, Batchelder ; that 
Drew had originally given Stowell the pistol ; 
and that when the latter was arrested and im- 
prisoned, on the night of the outbreak, he sent 
for Drew and managed to hand him the weapon, 
which Drew gave to some one else, who con- 
cealed it till long after the death of Stowell 
in the Civil War. This vital part of the facts, 
at the one point which made of the outbreak a 
capital offense, remained thus absolutely un- 
known, even to most of the participants, for 
thirty-four years. As Drew had seen the re- 
volver loaded in Worcester, and had found, 
after its restoration, that one barrel had been 
discharged, and as he was also in the attacking 
party and heard the firing, there can be no 
reasonable doubt that the revolver was fired. 
On the other hand, I am assured by George H. 
Munroe, Esq., of the "Boston Herald," who 
was a member of the coroner's jury, that the 
surgical examination was a very thorough one, 
and that the wound was undoubtedly made by a 
knife or bayonet, it being some two inches long, 
largest in the middle and tapering towards each 
end. A similar statement was made at the 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 157 

time, to one of my informants, by Dr. Charles 
T. Jackson, the reported discoverer of etheriza- 
tion, who was one of the surgical examiners. It 
is therefore pretty certain that Stowell's bullet 
did not hit the mark after all, and that the man 
who killed Batchelder is still unknown. 

All this, however, was without my knowledge ; 
I only knew that we were gradually forced 
back beyond the threshold, the door standing 
now wide open, and our supporters having fallen 
back to leave the steps free. Mr. Charles E. 
Stevens, in his "Anthony Burns, a History," 
published in 1856, says that I said on emerg- 
ing, " You cowards, will you desert us now ? " 
And though his narrative, like most contem- 
porary narratives, is full of inaccuracies, this 
statement may be true ; it was certainly what I 
felt, not knowing that a man had already been 
killed, and that Stowell and others had just 
been taken off by the police. I held my place 
outside, still hoping against hope that some 
concerted reinforcement might appear. Mean- 
while the deputy marshals retreated to the 
stairway, over which we could see their pistols 
pointing, the whole hall between us and them 
being brightly lighted. The moments passed 
on. One energetic young lawyer, named Seth 
Webb, whom I had known in college, ran up 
the steps, but I dissuaded him from entering 



IS8 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

alone, and he waited. Then followed one of 
the most picturesque incidents of the whole 
affair. In the silent pause that ensued there 
came quietly forth from the crowd the well- 
known form of Mr. Amos Bronson Alcott, the 
Transcendental philosopher. Ascending the 
lighted steps alone, he said tranquilly, turning 
to me and pointing forward, " Why are we not 
within ? " " Because," was the rather impatient 
answer, "these people will not stand by us." 
He said not a word, but calmly walked up the 
steps, — he and his familiar cane. He paused 
again at the top, the centre of all eyes, within 
and without ; a revolver sounded from within, 
but hit nobody ; and finding himself wholly un- 
supported, he turned and retreated, but without 
hastening a step. It seemed to me that, under 
the circumstances, neither Plato nor Pythago- 
ras could have done the thing better ; and the 
whole scene brought vividly back the similar 
appearance of the Gray Champion in Haw- 
thorne's tale. 

This ended the whole affair. Two com- 
panies of artillery had been ordered out, and 
two more of marines, these coming respectively 
from Fort Warren and the Charlestown Navy 
Yard. (Here again I follow Stevens.) Years 
after, the successor of the United States mar- 
shal, the Hon. Roland G. Usher, said to me 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 159 

that his predecessor had told him that the sur- 
prise was complete, and that thirty resolute 
men could have carried off Burns. Had the 
private entrance to the platform in Faneuil 
Hall existed then, as now, those thirty would 
certainly have been at hand. The alarm planned 
to be given from the gallery was heard in the 
meeting, but was disbelieved ; it was thought 
to be a scheme to interrupt the proceedings. 
Phillips had not received notice of it. Parker 
and Howe had not fully comprehended the 
project; but when the latter could finally get 
out of the hall he ran at full speed up to the 
Court-House, with Dr. William Francis Chan- 
ning at his side, and they — two of our most 
determined men — found the field lost. Had 
they and such as they been present, it might 
have been very different. 

The attempt being a failure and troops ap- 
proaching, I went down the steps. There is 
always a farce ready to succeed every tragedy, 
and mine occurred when a man in the crowd 
sidled quietly up to me and placidly remarked, 
"Mister, I guess you've left your rumberill." 
It flashed through my mind that before tak- 
ing hold of the beam I had set down my um- 
brella — for it was a showery day — over the 
railing of the Court-House steps. Recapturing 
this important bit of evidence, I made my way 



l6o CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

to Dr. W. F. Channing's house, had my cut 
attended to, and went to bed ; awaking in a 
somewhat battered condition the next morning, 
and being sent off to Worcester by my advisers. 
Then followed my arrest after a few days, — a 
matter conducted so courteously that the way 
of the transgressor became easy. 

Naturally enough, my neighbors and friends 
regarded my arrest and possible conviction as 
a glory or a disgrace according to their opin- 
ions on the slavery question. Fortunately it did 
not disturb my courageous mother, who wrote, 
" I assure you it does not trouble me, though 
I dare say that some of my friends are com- 
miserating me for having a son ' riotously and 
routously engaged,' " — these being the curious 
legal terms of the indictment. For myself, it 
was easy to take the view of my old favorite 
Lamennais, who regarded any life as rather 
incomplete which did not, as in his own case, 
include some experience of imprisonment in a 
good cause. (" II manque toujours quelque 
chose a la belle vie, qui ne finit pas sur le 
champ de bataille, sur I'echafaud ou en prison.") 
In my immediate household the matter was 
taken coolly enough to suggest a calm inquiry, 
one day, by the lady of the house, whether all 
my letters to her from the prison would prob- 
ably be read by the jailer ; to which a young 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH i6i 

niece, then staying with us, repHed with the 
levity of her years, "Not if he writes them in 
his usual handwriting." 

It was left to my honor to report myself at 
the station in due time to meet the officers of 
the law; and my family, responding to this 
courtesy, were even more anxious than usual 
that I should not miss the train. In Boston, 
my friend Richard Henry Dana went with me 
to the marshal's office ; and I was seated in a 
chair to be "looked over" for identification by 
the various officers who were to testify at the 
trial. They sat or stood around me in various 
attitudes, with a curious and solemn depth of 
gaze which seemed somewhat conventional and 
even melodramatic. It gave the exciting sen- 
sation of being a bold Turpin just from Houn- 
slow Heath ; but it was on a Saturday, and 
there was something exquisitely amusing in the 
extreme anxiety of Marshal Tukey — a dark, 
handsome, picturesque man, said to pride him- 
self on a certain Napoleonic look — that I 
should reach home in time for my Sunday's 
preaching. Later the long trial unrolled itself, 
in which, happily, my presence was not neces- 
sary after pleading to the indictment. Theo- 
dore Parker was the only one among the de- 
fendants who attended steadily every day, and 
he prepared that elaborate defense which was 



l62 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

printed afterwards. The indictment was ulti- 
mately quashed as imperfect, and we all got 
out of the affair, as it were, by the side-door. 

I have passed over the details of the trial as 
I omitted those relating to the legal defense of 
Burns, the efforts to purchase him, and his final 
delivery to his claimant, because I am describ- 
ing the affair only as a private soldier tells of 
what he personally saw and knew. I must, 
however, mention, in closing, a rather amusing 
afterpiece to the whole matter, — something 
which occurred on October 30, 1854. A Bos- 
ton policeman, named Butman, who had been 
active at the time of Burns' s capture, came up 
to Worcester for the purpose, real or reputed, 
of looking for evidence against those concerned 
in the riot. The city being intensely anti-sla- 
very and having a considerable colored popu- 
lation, there was a strong disposition to lynch 
the man, or at least to frighten him thoroughly, 
though the movement was checked by a manly 
speech to the crowd by George Frisbie Hoar, 
now United States Senator, but then a young 
lawyer ; the ultimate result being that But- 
man was escorted to the railway station on 
Mr. Hoar's arm, with a cordon of Abolitionists 
about him, as a shelter from the negroes who 
constantly rushed at him from the rear. I was 
one of this escort, and directly behind Butman 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 163 

walked Joseph Howland, a non-resistant of 
striking appearance, who satisfied his sensitive 
conscience by this guarded appeal, made at 
intervals in a sonorous voice : " Don't hurt him, 
mean as he is ! Don't kill him, mean though 
he be ! " At Rowland's side was Thomas Drew, 
a vivacious little journalist, already mentioned, 
who compounded with his conscience very differ- 
ently. Nudging back reprovingly the negroes 
and others who pressed upon the group, he 
would occasionally, when the coast was clear, 
run up and administer a vigorous kick to the 
unhappy victim, and then fall back to repress 
the assailants once more. As for these last, 
they did not seem to be altogether in earnest, 
but half in joke; although the scene gave the 
foundation for a really powerful chapter, called 
"The Roar of St. Domingo," in the now forgot- 
ten novel " Harrington," by W. D. O'Connor. 

Nevertheless, Butman was once knocked 
down by a stone ; and when we reached the 
station just as the express train moved away, 
thus leaving him behind, there began to come 
up an ugly shout from the mob, which seemed 
to feel for a moment that the Lord had deliv- 
ered the offender into its hands. As a horse 
with a wagon attached was standing near by, 
it was hastily decided to put Butman into the 
wagon and drive him off, — a proposal which he 



l64 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

eagerly accepted. I got in with him and took 
the reins ; but the mob around us grasped the 
wheels till the spokes began to break. Then 
the owner arrived, and seized the horse by the 
head to stop us. By the prompt action of 
the late William W. Rice, — since member of 
Congress, — a hack was at once substituted 
for the wagon ; it drove up close, so that But- 
man and I sprang into it and were whirled 
away before the mob fairly knew what had hap- 
pened. A few stones were hurled through the 
windows, and I never saw a more abject face 
than that of the slave-catcher as he crouched 
between the seats and gasped out, "They'll 
get fast teams and be after us." This, how- 
ever, did not occur, and we drove safely beyond 
the mob and out of the city towards Grafton, 
where Butman was to take a later train. Hav- 
ing him thus at my mercy, and being doubtless 
filled with prophetic zeal, I took an inhuman 
advantage of Butman, and gave him a discourse 
on the baseness of his whole career which 
would perhaps have made my reputation as a 
pulpit orator had my congregation consisted of 
more than one, or had any modem reporter 
been hidden under the cushions. Being over- 
taken a mile or two out of town by Lovell 
Baker, the city marshal, with a "fast team" 
such as Butman had dreaded, the man was 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 165 

transferred to him, and was driven by him, not 
merely to Grafton, but at Butman's urgent re- 
quest to Boston and through the most unfre- 
quented streets to his home, I meanwhile 
returned peacefully to Worcester, pausing only 
at the now deserted station to hunt up my 
wife's india-rubber overshoes, which I was car- 
rying to be mended when the ^meute broke out, 
and which I had sacrificed as heroically as I had 
nearly relinquished my umbrella at the Boston 
Court-House. 

The Burns affair was the last actual fugitive 
slave case that occurred in Massachusetts, al- 
though for some years we kept up organiza- 
tions and formed plans, and were better and 
better prepared for action as the call for it dis- 
appeared. I was for some years a stockholder 
in the yacht Flirt, which was kept in commis- 
sion under the faithful Captain Bearse, and 
was nominally let for hire, though really in- 
tended either to take slaves from incoming 
vessels, or, in case of need, to kidnap the claim- 
ant of a slave and keep him cruising on the 
coast of Maine until his claim should be surren- 
dered. It all now looks very far off, and there 
has been time for the whole affair to be re- 
garded in several different aspects. After the 
Civil War had accustomed men to the habitual 
use of arms and to military organization, the 



i66 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

"Burns riot" naturally appeared in retrospect 
a boyish and inadequate affair enough ; we 
could all see how, given only a community of 
veteran soldiers, the thing might have been 
more neatly managed. And again, now that 
thirty years of peace have almost extinguished 
the habits and associations of war, still another 
phase of feeling has come uppermost, and it 
seems almost incredible that any condition of 
things should have turned honest American 
men into conscientious law-breakers. Yet such 
transitions have occurred in all periods of his- 
tory, and the author of the " Greville Journals " 
records the amazement with which he heard 
that "Tom Grenville, so mild, so refined, 
adorned with such an amiable, venerable, and 
decorous old age," should be the same man 
who had helped, sixty years before, to carry the 
Admiralty building by storm in the riots occa- 
sioned by the trial of Admiral Keppel, and had 
been the second man to enter at the breach. 
Probably, if the whole truth were told, the sin- 
cere law-breakers of the world are the children 
of temperament as well as of moral conviction, 
and at any period of life, if the whirligig of time 
brought back the old conditions, would act very 
much as they acted before. 



VI 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 

" We are looking abroad and back after a literature. Let us come 
and live, and know in living a high philosophy and faith ; so shall 
we find now, here, the elements, and in our own good souls the 
fire. Of every storied bay and cliff we will make something in- 
finitely nobler than Salamis or Marathon. This pale Massachusetts 
sky, this sandy soil and raw wind, all shall nurture us. . . . Unlike 
all the world before us, our own age and land shall be classic to our- 
selves." 

The passage above quoted is from the Mas- 
ter of Arts oration of a young scholar — Robert 
Bartlett, of Plymouth — at the Harvard Com- 
mencement exercises of 1839. The original 
title of the oration was, "No Good Possible 
but shall One Day be Real." Bartlett, who had 
been the first scholar in his class, and was a 
tutor in the university, died a few years later, 
but the prophecy above given attracted much 
attention, and was printed in an English maga- 
zine, — "Heraud's Monthly" (April, 1840); — 
and when in that same year " The Dial " began 
to be published, the very first page of the first 
number gave as its basis " the strong current 
of thought and feeling which for a few years 



i68 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

past has led many sincere persons in New Eng- 
land to make new demands on literature." It 
was a foregone conclusion, however, that these 
new demands could not be fully met by the 
prophets who first announced them. Prophets 
only clear the way, and must wait for the 
slower march of trained though perhaps un- 
prophetic co-laborers. A new era of American 
literature was at hand, but the Transcendental 
movement of itself could not directly have cre- 
ated it. Neither its organ, " The Dial," nor the 
avowed successor of that magazine, the " Mas- 
sachusetts Quarterly Review," — announced by 
Theodore Parker as being "the Dial with a 
beard," — ever achieved a wide circulation. 
Fortunately, in the natural progress of things a 
new combination effected itself, and those who, 
like Holmes, had ridiculed the earlier move- 
ment found themselves ready within twenty 
years to unite with those who, like Emerson, 
had produced it ; that first impulse thus form- 
ing, by cohesion, a well-defined circle of contrib- 
utors who held for a time the visible leadership 
in American letters. 

That which saved this circle from becoming 
a clique and a mere mutual admiration soci- 
ety was its fortunate variety of personal tem- 
peraments. Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, 
Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, to name only 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 169 

the six most commonly selected as the repre- 
sentatives of this period, were really so dissimi- 
lar in many ways that they could not possibly 
duplicate one another, — indeed, could not al- 
ways understand one another; and thus they 
were absolutely prevented from imposing on 
Boston anything like the yoke which Christo- 
pher North at one time imposed on Edinburgh. 
This was still more true of others just outside 
the circle, — Motley, Parkman, Thoreau, — and 
in this way the essential variety in unity was 
secured. Then there were other men, almost 
equally gifted, who touched the circle, or might 
have touched it but that they belonged to the 
class of which Emerson says, " Of what use 
is genius if its focus be a little too short or a 
little too long ? " — Alcott, Ellery Channing, 
Weiss, Wasson, Brownlee Brown, each of whom 
bequeathed to posterity only a name, or some 
striking anecdote or verse, instead of a well- 
defined fame. 

It is an embarrassment, in dealing with any 
past period of literary history, that we have to 
look at its participants not merely as they now 
seem, but as they appeared in their day, and 
we must calculate their parallax. The men who 
in those years were actually creating American 
literature — creating it anew, that is, after the 
earlier and already subsiding impulse given by 



170 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

Irving and Cooper — do not retain the same 
relative precedence to which they at first 
seemed entitled ; Emerson and Hawthorne hav- 
ing held their own more indisputably than the 
rest of the group. Some who distinctly formed 
a part of the original Atlantic circle have in- 
deed failed to develop staying power. It would 
have scarcely appeared possible, in those days, 
that the brilliant and popular Whipple, who was 
at first thought a second Macaulay, should be 
at the end of the century an almost vanished 
force, while the eccentric and unsuccessful Tho- 
reau — whom Lowell and even his own neigh- 
bors set aside as a mere imitator of Emerson 
— is still growing in international fame. I 
remember well that when I endeavored to enlist 
Judge Hoar, the leading citizen of Concord, in 
an effort to persuade Miss Thoreau to allow 
her brother's journals to be printed, he heard 
me partly through, and then quickly said, "But 
you have left unsettled the preliminary question, 
Why should any one care to have Thoreau' s 
journals put in print?" I had to abandon the 
argument as clearly hopeless. It is also plain 
from Theodore Parker's correspondence that his 
estimate of Thoreau was but little higher than 
Judge Hoar's, 

My own relation to this circle was the hum- 
ble one of a man younger than the rest, brought 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 171 

up under their influence, yet naturally inde- 
pendent, not to say self-willed, and very much 
inclined to live his own life. I had long be- 
fore noted with delight in Plutarch the tale of 
the young Cicero consulting the Delphic oracle, 
and being there advised to live for himself, and 
not to take the opinions of others for his guide, 
— this answer being called by Niebuhr " one of 
the oracles which might tempt one to believe in 
the actual inspiration of the goddess." There 
was not one of these older men whom I had not 
sometimes felt free to criticise, with the pre- 
sumption of youth ; complaining of Emerson as 
being inorganic in structure ; finding Whittier 
sometimes crude, Hawthorne bloodless in style. 
Holmes a trifler, Longfellow occasionally com- 
monplace, Lowell often arrogant. All this crit- 
icism was easier because I then lived at a distance 
from Boston. At times, no doubt, I was dis- 
posed to fancy myself destined to unite all their 
virtues and avoid all their faults, while at other 
moments I felt, more reasonably, that I might 
be of some use in gathering the scattered crumbs 
from their table. It is quite certain that I was 
greatly pleased when I had sent to the "At- 
lantic Monthly " my first contribution, " Saints 
and their Bodies," and saw it printed in the 
fifth number ; it being later characterized by 
Holmes as " an admirable paper," and he also 



172 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

designating me as "a young friend" of his, — 
a phrase which awakened, I regret to say, some 
scarcely veiled irreverence on the part of a 
young fellow at the Worcester Gymnastic Club, 
of which I was then president. Alas, I was 
already thirty-three years old, and youth is mer- 
ciless. Nor can I wonder at the criticism when 
I recall that the daring boy who made it died a 
few years after in the Civil War, a brevet briga- 
dier-general, at the age of twenty. 

I had previously written an article for the 
"North American Review," another for the 
" Christian Examiner," and three papers in 
prose for "Putnam's Magazine," one of these 
latter being a description of a trip to Mount Ka- 
tahdin, written as a jen d' esprit in the assumed 
character of a lady of the party. A few poems 
of mine had also been accepted by the last- 
named periodical ; but these had attracted little 
notice, and the comparative ^clat attendant on 
writing for the " Atlantic Monthly " made it 
practically, in my case, the beginning of a lit- 
erary life. I was at once admitted to the At- 
lantic Club, an informal dinner of contributors 
in those days, and at first found it enjoyable. 
Before this I had belonged to a larger club, — 
rather short-lived, but including some of the 
same men, — the Town and Country Club, 
organized in 1849, ^t Boston. The earlier club 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 173 

had no dinners ; in fact, it erred on the side of 
asceticism, being formed, as Emerson declared, 
largely to afford a local habitation and dignified 
occupation to Mr, Alcott. Had its christening 
been left to the latter, a rhetorical grandeur 
would have belonged to its very opening ; for 
he only hesitated whether the " Olympian Club " 
or the " Pan Club " would be the more suita- 
ble designation. Lowell marred the dignity of 
the former proposal by suggesting the name 
" Club of Hercules " as a substitute for " Olym- 
pian ;" and since the admission of women was a 
vexed question at the outset, Lowell thought 
the "Patty Pan " quite appropriate. Upon this 
question, indeed, the enterprise very nearly 
went to pieces ; and Mr. Sanborn has printed 
in his " Life of Alcott " a characteristic letter 
from Emerson to myself, after I had, in order to 
test the matter, placed the names of Elizabeth 
Peabody and Mary Lowell Putnam — Lowell's 
sister, and also well known as a writer — on the 
nomination book. Emerson himself, with one 
of those serene and lofty coups d'etat of which 
only the saints are capable, took a pen and 
erased these names, although the question had 
not yet come up for decision, but was still pend- 
ing when the erasure was made. Another 
vexed subject was the admission of colored 
members, the names of Frederick Douglass 



174 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

and Charles Lenox Remond being proposed. 
This Lowell strongly favored, but wrote to me 
that he thought Emerson would vote against 
it ; indeed, Emerson, as he himself admitted 
to me, was one of that minority of anti-slavery 
men who confessed to a mild natural colorpho- 
bia, controlled only by moral conviction. These 
names were afterwards withdrawn ; but the 
Town and Country Club died a natural death 
before the question of admitting women was 
finally settled. 

That matter was not, however, the occasion 
of the final catastrophe, which was brought on 
by Falstaff's remediless disease, a consumption 
of the purse. Ellery Channing said that the 
very name of the club had been fatal to it ; that 
it promised an impossible alliance between Bos- 
ton lawyers, who desired only a smoking-room, 
and, on the other hand, as he declared, a num- 
ber of country ministers, who expected to be 
boarded and lodged, and to have their washing 
done, whenever they came up to the city. In 
either case, the original assessment of five dol- 
lars was clearly too small, and the utter hope- 
lessness of raising any additional amount was 
soon made manifest. After the club had ex- 
isted six months, a circular was issued, asking 
the members to remit, if possible, two dollars 
each before April 4, 1850, that the debts of the 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 175 

club might be paid, and their fellow members 
"be relieved from an unequal burden." This 
sealed the doom of the enterprise, and " the 
rest is silence." It is now far easier to organize 
a University Club on a fifty or one hundred 
dollar basis than it was then to skim the cream 
of intellectual Boston at five dollars a head. 
The fine phrase introduced by Mr. Alcott into 
the constitution, "the economies of the club," 
proved only too appropriate, as the organization 
had to be very economical indeed. Its member- 
ship, nevertheless, was well chosen and varied. 
At its four monthly gatherings, the lecturers 
were Theodore Parker, Henry James the elder, 
Henry Giles (then eminent as a Shakespeare 
lecturer), and the Rev. William B. Greene, 
afterwards colonel of the First Massachusetts 
Heavy Artillery. Among the hundred or more 
members, there were well-known lawyers, as 
Sumner, E. R. Hoar, Hillard, Burlingame, 
Bemis, and Sewall ; and there were clergy- 
men, as Parker, Hedge, W. H. Channing, Hill, 
Bartol, Frothingham, and Hale ; the only non- 
Unitarian clergyman being the Rev. John O. 
Choules, a cheery little English Baptist, who 
had been round the world with Commodore 
Vanderbilt in his yacht, and might well feel 
himself equal to any worldly companionship. 
The medical profession was represented by Drs. 



176 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

Channing, Bowditch, Howe, and Loring ; and 
the mercantile world by the two brothers Ward, 
Franklin Haven, William D. Ticknor, and 
James T. Fields. Art appeared only in John 
Cheney, the engraver, and literature in the 
persons of Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, 
Lowell, and Whipple. These five authors were 
contributors to the "Atlantic Monthly," and 
took part also in the early dinners of the At- 
lantic Club. 

Holmes, as it appears from his biography, 
confounded the Atlantic Club, in his later re- 
collections, with its larger coeval, the Saturday 
Club ; but they will be found very clearly dis- 
criminated in Longfellow's journals. During 
the first year of the magazine under Phillips & 
Sampson's management, there were monthly 
dinners, in or near Boston, under the general- 
ship of Francis H. Underwood, the office editor, 
and John C. Wyman, then his assistant. The 
most notable of these gatherings was undoubt- 
edly that held at the Revere House, on occa- 
sion of Mrs. Stowe's projected departure for 
Europe. It was the only one to which ladies 
were invited, and the invitation was accepted 
with a good deal of hesitation by Mrs. Stowe, 
and with a distinct guarantee that no wine 
should be furnished for the guests. Other femi- 
nine contributors were invited, but for various 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 177 

reasons no ladies appeared except Mrs. Stowe 
and Miss Harriet Prescott (now Mrs. Spof- 
ford), who had already won fame by a story 
called " In a Cellar," the scene of which was 
laid in Paris, and which was so thoroughly 
French in all its appointments that it was sus- 
pected of being a translation from that lan- 
guage, although much inquiry failed to reveal 
the supposed original. It may be well to add 
that the honest young author had so little ap- 
preciation of the high compliment thus paid 
her that she indignantly proposed to withdraw 
her manuscript in consequence. These two 
ladies arrived promptly, and the gentlemen were 
kept waiting, not greatly to their minds, in the 
hope that other fair contributors would appear. 
When at last it was decided to proceed without 
further delay. Dr. Holmes and I were detailed 
to escort the ladies to the dining-room : he as 
the head of the party, and I as the only one 
who knew the younger lady. As we went up- 
stairs the vivacious Autocrat said to me, " Can 
I venture it .-' Do you suppose that Mrs. Stowe 
disapproves of me very much .^ " — he being 
then subject to severe criticism from the more 
conservative theologians. The lady was gra- 
cious, however, and seemed glad to be rescued 
at last from her wearisome waiting. She came 
downstairs wearing a green wreath, of which 



178 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

Longfellow says in his diary (July 9, 1859) that 
he " thought it very becoming." 

We seated ourselves at table, Mrs. Stowe at 
Lowell's right, and Miss Prescott at Holmes's, 
I next to her, Edmund Quincy next to me. 
Dr. Stowe was at Holmes's left, Whittier at 
his ; and Longfellow, Underwood, John Wyman, 
and others were present. I said at once to 
Miss Prescott, " This is a new edition of * Eve- 
lina, or a Young Lady's Entrance into the 
World.' Begin at the beginning : what did you 
and Mrs. Stowe talk about for three quarters 
of an hour ? " She answered demurely, " No- 
thing, except that she once asked me what 
o'clock it was, and I told her I didn't know." 
There could hardly be a better illustration of 
that curious mixture of mauvaise honte and 
indifference which often marred the outward 
manners of that remarkable woman. It is very 
likely that she had not been introduced to her 
companion, and perhaps had never heard her 
name ; but imagine any kindly or gracious per- 
son of middle age making no effort to relieve 
the shyness of a young girl stranded with herself 
during three quarters of an hour of enforced 
seclusion ! 

The modest entertainment proceeded ; con- 
versation set in, but there was a visible awk- 
wardness, partly from the presence of two 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 179 

ladies, one of whom was rather silent by reason 
of youth, and the other by temperament ; and 
moreover, the thawing influence of wine was 
wanting. There were probably no men of the 
party, except Whittier and myself, who did 
not habitually drink it, and various little jokes 
began to circle sotto voce at the table ; a sug- 
gestion, for instance, from Longfellow, that Miss 
Prescott might be asked to send down into her 
Cellar for the wine she had described so well, 
since Mrs. Stowe would allow none abovestairs. 
Soon, however, a change came over the aspect 
of affairs. My neighbor on the right, Edmund 
Quincy, called a waiter mysteriously, and giv- 
ing him his glass of water remained tranquilly 
while it was being replenished. It came back 
suffused with a rosy hue. Some one else fol- 
lowed his example, and presently the "con- 
scious water" was blushing at various points 
around the board, although I doubt whether 
Holmes, with water-drinkers two deep on each 
side of him, got really his share of the cov- 
eted beverage. If he had, it might have modi- 
fied the course of his talk, for I remember that 
he devoted himself largely to demonstrating to 
Dr. Stowe that all swearing doubtless origi- 
nated in the free use made by the pulpit of 
sacred words and phrases ; while Lowell, at the 
other end of the table, was maintaining for Mrs. 



i8o CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

Stowe's benefit that " Tom Jones " was the 
best novel ever written. This line of discussion 
may have been lively, but was not marked by 
eminent tact ; and Whittier, indeed, told me 
afterwards that Dr. and Mrs. Stowe agreed in 
saying to him that while the company at the 
club was no doubt distinguished, the conver- 
sation was not quite what they had been led to 
expect. Yet Dr. Stowe was of a kindly nature 
and perhaps was not seriously disturbed even 
when Holmes assured him that there were in 
Boston whole families not perceptibly affected by 
Adam's fall ; as for instance, the family of Ware. 
In the minor gatherings of the Atlantic 
Club I became gradually conscious of a certain 
monotony. Neither Emerson nor Longfellow 
nor Whittier was a great talker, and though 
the conversation was always lively enough, it 
had too much the character of a dialogue be- 
tween Holmes and Lowell. Neither of these 
had received the beneficent discipline of Eng- 
lish dining-rooms, where, as I learned long 
after, one is schooled into self-restraint ; and 
even if I never heard in London any talk that 
was on the whole so clever as theirs, yet in 
the end the carving is almost as important as 
the meat. Living in Worcester, I saw little of 
my fellow contributors except at those dinners, 
though Emerson frequently lectured in that 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE i8i. 

growing city, and I occasionally did the same 
thing at Concord, where I sometimes stayed at 
his house. It was a delight to be in his study, 
to finger his few and well-read books ; a disci- 
pline of humility to have one's modest portman- 
teau carried upstairs by Plato himself ; a joy 
to see him, relapsed into a happy grandparent, 
hold a baby on his knee, and wave his playful 
finger above the little clutching hands, saying 
joyously, "This boy is a little philosopher ; he 
philosophizes about everything." To Worces- 
ter came also Alcott and Thoreau, from time 
to time ; the former to give those mystic 
monologues which he called conversations, and 
which were liable to be disturbed and even 
checked when any other participant offered 
anything but meek interrogatories. Thoreau 
came to take walks in the woods, or perhaps 
to Wachusett, with Harrison Blake, his later 
editor, and with Theophilus Brown, the freshest 
and most original mind in Worcester, by voca- 
tion a tailor, and sending out more sparkles of 
wit and humor over his measuring-tape and 
scissors than any one else could extract from 
Rabelais or Montaigne. Sometimes I joined 
the party, and found Thoreau a dry humorist, 
and also a good walker ; while Alcott, although 
he too walked, usually steered for a convenient 
log in the edge of the first grove, and, seat- 



i82 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

ing himself there, "conversed" once more. It 
may be that there are men now as quaint and 
original as were easily accessible in those days ; 
but if so, I wish some one would favor me with 
a letter of introduction. 

It was perhaps an advantage to me, and cer- 
tainly a great convenience, that I did not begin 
writing for magazines until I was above thirty. 
I thus escaped the preliminary ordeal of rejec- 
tion, a thing which I have indeed encountered 
but once in respect to prose papers, during 
my whole literary life. As Lowell, Holmes, 
and Underwood all heartily approved my early 
essays, I was tempted to stretch their range 
wider and try experiments. This was not so 
much from any changeableness or a wish to be 
credited with versatility, — a quality which I 
commonly distrusted and criticised in others, 
— but because there were so many interesting 
things to write about ; and because I had possi- 
bly been rather too much impressed by one of 
Emerson's perilous maxims as applied to any 
writer, " If he has hit the mark, let others shat- 
ter the target." If my critics agreed that I 
could write a fairly good historical essay such 
as "A Charge with Prince Rupert," or a good 
outdoor paper such as "A Procession of the 
Flowers," it seemed better to try my hand at 
something: else. There was no indolence about 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 183 

this ; it was simply an eager desire to fill all 
the parts. Such versatility makes life very 
enjoyable, but perhaps not so really useful or 
successful as a career like that of my con- 
temporary, Francis Parkman, who used to be 
surrounded, even in college, by books of Indian 
travel and French colonial history, and who 
kept at work for half a century on his vast 
theme until he achieved for himself a great lit- 
erary monument. He was really a specialist 
before the days of specialism. To adopt a dif- 
ferent method, as I did, is to put one's self too 
much in the position of a celebrated horse once 
owned by a friend of mine, — a horse which 
had never won a race, but which was prized 
as having gained a second place in more races 
than any other horse in America. Yet it is to 
be remembered that there is a compensation in 
all these matters : the most laborious historian 
is pretty sure to be superseded within thirty 
years — as it has already been prophesied that 
even Parkman will be — by the mere accumu- 
lation of new material ; while the more dis- 
cursive writer may perchance happen on some 
felicitous statement that shall rival in immor- 
tality Fletcher of Saltoun's one sentence, or the 
single sonnet of Blanco White. 

In 1859 the "Atlantic Monthly" passed into 
the hands of Ticknor & Fields, the junior pub- 



i84 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

lisher becoming finally its editor. It was a 
change of much importance to all its contribu- 
tors, and greatly affected my own literary life. 
Lowell had been, of course, an appreciative 
and a sympathetic editor, yet sometimes dila- 
tory and exasperating. Thus, a paper of mine 
on Theodore Parker, which should have ap- 
peared directly after the death of its subject, 
was delayed for five months by being acci- 
dentally put under a pile of unexamined manu- 
scripts. Lowell had, moreover, some conserva- 
tive reactions, and my essay "Ought Women 
to Learn the Alphabet ? " which would now 
seem very innocent, and probably had a wider 
circulation than any other magazine article I 
ever wrote, was not accepted without some 
shaking of the head, though it was finally given 
the place of honor in the number. Fields had 
the advantage over Lowell of being both editor 
and publisher, so that he had a free hand as 
to paying for articles. The prices then paid 
were lower than now, but were raised steadily ; 
and he first introduced the practice of paying 
for each manuscript on acceptance, though he 
always lamented that this failed of its end so 
far as he was individually concerned. His 
object was to quiet the impatience of those 
whose contributions were delayed ; but he de- 
clared that such persons complained more than 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 185 

ever, saying, " Since you valued my contribution 
so highly as to pay for it, you surely should 
print it at once." He had a virtue which I have 
never known in any other editor or publisher, 
— that of volunteering to advance money on 
prospective articles, yet to be written ; and he 
did this more than once to me. I have also 
known him to increase the amount paid, on 
finding that an author particularly needed the 
money, especially if it were the case of a wo- 
man. His sympathy with struggling women 
was always very great ; and I think he was 
the only one in the early " Atlantic " circle, ex- 
cept Whittier and myself, — with Emerson also, 
latterly, — who favored woman suffrage. This 
financial kindliness was a part of his general 
theory of establishing a staff, in which effort 
he really succeeded, most of his contributors 
then writing only for him, — an aim which his 
successors abandoned, as doubtless became in- 
evitable in view of the rapid multiplication of 
magazines. Certainly there was something very 
pleasant about Fields's policy on this point ; 
and perhaps he petted us all rather too much. 
He had some of the defects of his qualities, — 
could not help being a little of a flatterer, and 
sometimes, though not always, evaded the tell- 
ing of wholesome truths. 

I happened to be one of his favorites; he 



i86 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

even wished me, at one time, to undertake the 
whole critical department, which I luckily de- 
clined, although it appears by the index that I 
wrote more largely for the first twenty volumes 
of the magazine than any other contributor 
except Lowell and Holmes. Fields was con- 
stantly urging me to attempt fiction, and when 
I somewhat reluctantly followed his advice, he 
thought better of the result, I believe, than any 
one else did ; for my story of " Malbone," espe- 
cially, he prophesied a fame which the public 
has not confirmed. Yet he was not indiscrimi- 
nate in his praise, and suggested some amend- 
ments which improved that tale very much. 
He was capable also of being influenced by ar- 
gument, and was really the only editor I have 
ever encountered whose judgment I could move 
for an instant by any cajoling ; editors being, 
as a rule, a race made of adamant, as they 
should be. On the other hand, he advised 
strongly against my writing the " Young Folks' 
History of the United States," which never- 
theless turned out incomparably the most suc- 
cessful venture I ever made, having sold to the 
extent of two hundred thousand copies, and still 
selling well after twenty years. His practical 
judgment was thus not infallible, but it came 
nearer to it than that of any other literary man 
I have ever known. With all his desire to 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 187 

create a staff, Fields was always eagerly looking 
out for new talent, and was ever prompt to 
counsel and encourage. He liked, of course, 
to know eminent men ; and his geese were apt 
to be swans, yet he was able to discriminate. 
He organized Dickens's readings, for instance, 
and went to every one of them, yet confessed 
frankly that their pathos was a failure ; that 
Little Nell was unreal, and Paul Dombey a 
tiresome creature whose death was a relief. 
Fields was really a keen judge of character, 
and had his own fearless standards, I once 
asked him which he liked the better personally, 
Thackeray or Dickens, and he replied, after a 
moment's reflection, " Dickens, because Thack- 
eray enjoyed telling questionable stories, a thing 
which Dickens never did." 

There has been endless discussion as to the 
true worth of the literary movement of which 
the circle of "Atlantic " writers was the source. 
By some, no doubt, it has been described with 
exaggerated claims, and by others with a dis- 
approbation quite as unreasonable. Time alone 
can decide the precise award ; the essential fact 
is that in this movement American literature 
was born, or, if not born, — for certainly Irving 
and Cooper had preceded, — was at least set 
on its feet. Whether it could not have been 
better born is a profitless question. This group 



I88 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

of writers was doubtless a local product ; but 
so is every new variety of plum or pear which 
the gardener finds in his garden. He does not 
quarrel with it for having made its appearance 
in some inconvenient corner instead of in the 
centre, nor does he think it unpardonable that 
it did not show itself everywhere at once ; the 
thing of importance is that it has arrived. The 
new literary impulse was indigenous, and, as 
far as it felt an exotic influence, that force was 
at any rate not English ; it was French, Italian, 
and above all German, so far as its external 
factors went. Nothing could be much further 
from the truth than the late remark of an es- 
sayist that Boston is " almost the sole survival 
upon our soil of a purely English influence." 
As a matter of fact, the current of thought 
which between 1816 and 181 8 took our whole 
American educational system away from the 
English tradition, and substituted the German 
methods, had been transmitted through four 
young men from New England, who had stud- 
ied together at Gdttingen. These reporters had 
sent back the daring assertion that while our 
cisatlantic schools and colleges had nothing to 
learn from England, — not even from the Ox- 
ford and Cambridge of that day, — they had, 
on the contrary, everything to learn from the 
German institutions. The students in question 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 189 

were Cogswell, Everett, Ticknor, and, in a less 
degree, Bancroft. Three of these went from 
Harvard College, Everett and Bancroft at the 
expense of the university ; while Ticknor went 
from Dartmouth. They all brought back to 
Harvard what they could not find in England, 
but had gained in Germany ; Everett writing 
to my father in a letter which lies before me 
(dated June 6, 181 8), *' There is more teach- 
ing and more learning in our American Cam- 
bridge than there is in Oxford and Cambridge 
put together." They laid the foundation for 
non-English training not only in Boston, but in 
America, at a time when the very best literary 
journal in New York, and indeed in this coun- 
try, was called " The Albion," and was English 
through and through. 

It was, in fact, made a temporary reproach 
to the early Transcendental movement that it 
was too French or too German, and not Eng- 
lish enough ; and when George Ripley's library 
was sold, it proved to be by far the best Ger- 
man library in New England except Theodore 
Parker's. There was at that time an eager 
clamoring not only for German, but for French, 
Italian, and even Swedish literature ; then, 
when the " Atlantic " circle succeeded to the do- 
main of the Transcendentalists, it had in Long- 
fellow the most accomplished translator of his 



190 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

day; and the Continental influence still went 
at least side by side with the English, if it did 
not prevail over it. But behind this question 
of mere intellectual aliment lay the problem 
whether we should have a literature of our 
own ; and it was a strength, not a weakness, 
in these men when they aimed, in the words 
of young Robert Bartlett, to make us " classic 
to ourselves." Probably no one who did not 
live in those days can fully realize what it was 
to us to have our own aspects of nature, our 
own historic scenes, our own types of character, 
our own social problems, brought up and given 
a prominent place. The mere substitution of 
bobolink and oriole for lark and nightingale was 
a delicious novelty. At any rate, for good or 
evil, the transition was made. If the achieve- 
ment took on too much flavor of moral earnest- 
ness, as is now complained, this may have been 
inevitable. In hewing down the forest, the 
axe must have weight as well as edge. In the 
work that obtruded itself while this literature 
was being created, — the crushing of Ameri- 
can slavery by the strong hand, — it was not 
found that this moral force had been a thing 
superfluous. It was not a Bostonian, but a New 
Yorker (Mr. John Jay Chapman), who lately 
said of Emerson, " It will not be denied that 
he sent ten thousand sons to the war." 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 191 

It is certain, at any rate, that a belief like 
this, in a literature actually forming before my 
eyes, was an important part of my happiness 
during my Worcester life, and that the work 
growing out of it became by degrees a seri- 
ous interference with that required by the Free 
Church, and led me to quit the latter. I had 
also many other affairs on hand, being, as Mr, 
Alcott said of me, " a man of tasks ; " and all 
these, while multiplying enjoyment and useful- 
ness, were crowding too much on one another. 
I interested myself in the new question of a 
prohibitory liquor law, was for a time secretary 
of the state committee, and also took a hand — 
again aided by Martin Stowell — in enforcing 
the law in Worcester. Experience brought me 
to the opinion, which I have ever since held, that 
such a law is useless except under the limita- 
tions of local option, so that the moral pressure 
of each locality may be behind its enforcement. 

I have already spoken of continued anti- 
slavery work in Worcester. I was also deeply 
interested in the problem of discharged con- 
victs, having in that direction one experience 
so interesting that I must find room for it. In 
another town of Massachusetts I had known a 
young man of most respectable family, who, 
after a series of skillful burglaries, had been 
sent to prison on an eight years sentence. He 



192 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

had there sustained an excellent character, and, 
after visiting him just before liberation, I had 
brought him to Worcester, and placed him in a 
family of worthy English people belonging to 
the Free Church, who carried on at home a 
little manufacturing business which he readily 
learned. Of course they were told his story, 
and their willingness to take him was the more 
admirable inasmuch as they had once tried 
much the same experiment and had been de- 
ceived. He behaved perfectly well, yet told 
me frankly that he used to loiter before jewel- 
ers' windows and think how easily he could get 
possession of the glittering treasures inside. 
He ultimately married a farmer's daughter in 
a village near Worcester ; he set up a little 
shop on very scanty capital, but made no effort 
to eke it out by any dishonorable action ; and 
when the war came he somehow got a lieu- 
tenant's commission, but for some reason was 
never assigned to any regiment, and eventually 
died of disease. Here was a life saved from 
further wrong, and by the simplest means ; and 
when, in later life, I attended as a delegate the 
meetings of prison reformers in Europe, I was 
firm in the conviction that such things as I 
have described could be done. 

As to work within the circle of my own 
people, I found plenty of it, and on the whole 



THE BIRTH OP^ A LITERATURE 193 

enjoyed it. They had almost all come from 
more conservative religious bodies, and some 
of the best of them were Spiritualists. Only 
one of the local clergy would exchange with 
me, — the exception being, as may be easily 
believed, Edward Everett Hale, who had not 
yet migrated to Boston, — but I was gradually 
brought into amicable relations with many of 
the others, and had no reason to complain. I 
was on the school committee until I was 
dropped, during the Know-Nothing excitement, 
for defending the right of a Roman Catholic 
father to decide which version of the Scriptures 
his child should read in school. Twice I have 
thus been honorably dismissed from school 
committees; for the same thing happened again 
in Newport, Rhode Island, ten years later, in 
consequence of the part I took in securing the 
abolition of separate colored schools. In both 
cases I was reinstated later ; being appointed 
on a special examination committee in Worces- 
ter together with a Roman Catholic priest, and 
on the regular committee in Newport with a 
colored clergyman ; thus " bringing my sheaves 
with me," as a clever woman said. I had a 
hand in organizing the great Worcester Public 
Library, and was one of its early board of trus- 
tees, at a time when we little dreamed of its 
expansion and widespread usefulness. 



194 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

The old love for natural history survived, and 
I undertook again the microscopic work which 
I had begun in Newburyport under the guid- 
ance of an accomplished biologist, Dr. Henry C. 
Perkins. He had also introduced me to the 
works of Oken and Richard Owen ; and I had 
written for the "Christian Examiner" (July, 
1852) a paper called " Man and Nature," given 
first as a lyceum lecture, which expressed some- 
thing of that morning glow before sunrise 
which existed after the views of Goethe and 
Oken had been made public, but when Dar- 
win's great discoveries were yet to be achieved. 
In Worcester I did a great deal in the way of 
field observation, and organized, with Hale and 
others, the local Natural History Society, one 
branch of which, the botanical club, still bears 
my name. I also read many books on anthro- 
pology, and wrote for the " Atlantic " various 
essays on kindred themes, which were after- 
wards published in a volume as " Out-Door 
Papers." The preparation for this work gave 
that " enormity of pleasure," in Wordsworth's 
phrase, which only the habit of minute and 
written observation can convey; and I had 
many happy days, especially in the then unpro- 
faned regions of Lake Quinsigamond. With 
all this revived the old love of athletic exer- 
cises : I was president of a gymnastic club, a 



THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 195 

skating club, and a cricket club, playing in sev- 
eral match games with the latter. I never 
actually belonged to a volunteer engine com- 
pany, such as then existed everywhere, — it is 
a wonder that I did not, — but was elected an 
honorary member of Tiger Engine Company 
Number 6, though unluckily the Tigers engaged 
in a general fight at their annual meeting, be- 
fore I could join, and the company was dis- 
solved by the city fathers in consequence ; so 
that this crowning distinction was at the last 
moment wrested from me. Thus passed the 
years, until the Kansas excitement burst upon 
the nation and opened the way to new experi- 
ences. 



VII 

KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 

Coming into Boston Harbor in September, 
1856, after a long and stormy passage in a sail- 
ing vessel from the island of Fayal, the passen- 
gers, of whom I was one, awaited with eager 
interest the arrival of the pilot. He proved to 
be one of the most stolid and reticent of his 
tribe, as impenetrable to our curiosity as were 
his own canvas garments to raindrops. At 
last, as if to shake us off, he tugged from 
some remote pocket a torn fragment of a daily 
newspaper, — large enough to set before our 
eyes at a glance the momentous news of the 
assault on Charles Sumner in the United States 
Senate, and of the blockading of the Missouri 
River against Free State emigrants. Arrived 
on shore, my immediate party went at once to 
Worcester ; and the public meeting held by 
my friends to welcome me back became also 
a summons to call out volunteer emigrants 
for Kansas. Worcester had been thoroughly 
wakened to the needs of the new Territory 
through the formation of the Emigrant Aid 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 197 

Society, which had done much good by direct- 
ing public attention to the opportunities of- 
fered by Kansas, though the enterprise had 
already lost some momentum by the obvious 
limitations of its method of " organized emigra- 
tion." It had been shown that it was easy to 
get people to go together to a new colony, but 
hard to keep them united after they got there, 
since they could not readily escape the Amer- 
ican impulse to disregard organization and go 
to work, each for himself ; this desire being as 
promptly visible in the leaders as in anybody 
else. Moreover, it seemed necessary to arm any 
party of colonists more openly and thoroughly 
than had been the policy of the Emigrant Aid 
Society ; and so a new movement became need- 
ful, A committee was appointed, of which I was 
secretary, with a view to sending a series of 
parties from Worcester ; and of these we in the 
end furnished three. 

First, however, I was sent to St. Louis to 
meet a party of Massachusetts emigrants, un- 
der Dr. Calvin Cutter, who had been turned 
back from the river by the Missourians, or 
"Border Ruffians," as they had then begun to 
be called. I was charged with funds to pro- 
vide for the necessities of this body, and was 
also to report on the practicability of either 
breaking the river blockade or flanking it. A 



198 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

little inquiry served to show that only the lat- 
ter method would as yet be available. Events 
moved rapidly ; a national committee was soon 
formed, with headquarters at Chicago, and it 
was decided to send all future emigrants across 
Iowa and Nebraska, fighting their way, if neces- 
sary, into Kansas. Our three parties, accord- 
ingly, went by that route ; the men being pro- 
vided with rifles, revolvers, and camp equipage. 
Two of these parties made their rendezvous in 
Worcester, one under command of my friend 
Stowell ; the third party was formed largely of 
Maine lumbermen, recruited in a body for the 
service. I never saw thirty men of finer phy- 
sique, as they strode through Boston in their 
red shirts and rough trousers to meet us at the 
Emigrant Aid Society rooms, which had been 
kindly lent us for the purpose. The rest of the 
men came to us singly, from all over New Eng- 
land, some of the best being from Vermont, 
including William Thompson, afterwards John 
Brown's son-in-law, killed at Harper's Ferry. 

I have never ceased to regret that all the 
correspondence relating to these companies, 
though most carefully preserved for years, was 
finally lost through a casualty, and they must 
go forever unrecorded ; but it was all really a 
rehearsal in advance of the great enlistments 
of the Civil War. The men were personally of 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 199 

as high a grade as the later recruits, perhaps 
even higher ; they were of course mostly undis- 
ciplined, and those who had known something 
of military service — as in the Mexican War, 
for instance — were usually the hardest to man- 
age, save and except the stalwart lumbermen, 
who were from the beginning a thorn in the 
flesh to the worthy Orthodox Congregational 
clergyman whom it became necessary to put 
in charge of this final party of emigrants. He 
wrote back to me that if I had any lingering 
doubts of the doctrine of total depravity, I had 
better organize another party of Maine lumber- 
men and pilot them to Kansas. Sympathy 
was certainly due to him ; and yet I should 
have liked to try the experiment. 

Being appointed as an agent of the National 
Kansas Committee, I went out in September, 
1856, to meet and direct this very party, and 
others — including several hundred men — 
which had been collected on the Nebraska 
border. The events of the six weeks following 
were described by me in a series of letters, 
signed " Worcester," in the " New York Tri- 
bune," and later collected in a pamphlet entitled 
"A Ride through Kansas." It was a period 
when history was being made very rapidly, — a 
period which saw a policy of active oppression 
at last put down and defeated, although backed 



200 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

by the action or sustained by the vacillation of 
the national government. The essential differ- 
ence between the Northern and the Southern 
forces in Kansas at that period was that the 
Northern men went as bona fide settlers, and 
the Southerners mainly to break up elections 
and so make it a Slave Territory. Every mem- 
ber of our Worcester parties signed a pledge 
to settle in Kansas, and nearly all kept it. On 
the other hand, the parties from South Caro- 
lina and Virginia, whom I afterwards encoun- 
tered, had gone there simply on a lark, meaning 
to return home when it was over, as they freely 
admitted. This difference of material, rather 
than any superiority of organization, was what 
finally gave Kansas to freedom. 

The end of Western railway communication 
was then Iowa City, in Iowa, and those who 
would reach Kansas had six hundred miles 
farther to walk or ride. I myself rode across 
Iowa for four days and nights on the top of 
a stage-coach, in the path of my emigrants, — 
watching the sun go down blazing, and some- 
times pear-shaped, over the prairie horizon, just 
as it goes down beyond the ocean, and then 
seeing it rise in the same way. When the 
stage at last rolled me into Nebraska City, it 
seemed as if I had crossed the continent, for I 
had passed through Council Bluffs, which in 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 2oi 

my school geography had figured as the very 
outpost of the nation. Once arrived there, I 
felt as bewildered as a little boy on the Ca- 
nadian railway who, when the conductor an- 
nounced the small village called London, waked 
from a doze and exclaimed in my hearing, " Do 
we really pass through London — that great 
city ? " One of the first needful duties was to 
visit our party of lumbermen and restore peace, 
if possible, between them and their officers. 
For this purpose I made my first stump speech, 
in a literal sense, standing on a simple ped- 
estal of that description, and reasoning with the 
mutineers to the best of my ability. They had 
behaved so like grown-up children that I fear 
my discourse was somewhat in the line adopted 
in later years by a brilliant woman of my ac- 
quaintance, whose son had got into a college 
difficulty. I asked her, " Did you talk the 
matter over with him ? " " Certainly," she said 
eagerly. " I reasoned with him. I said to him, 

* L , you are a great fool ! ' " It was not 

necessary to be quite so plain-spoken in this 
case ; and as I was fortified by the fact of hav- 
ing all their means of subsistence in a money- 
belt about my waist, the advantage was clearly 
on my side, and some order was finally brought 
out of chaos. 

Soon after arriving I had to drive from Ne- 



202 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

braska City to Tabor on an errand, over about 
twenty miles of debatable ground, absolutely 
alone. It had been swept by the hostile par- 
ties of both factions ; there was no more law 
than in the Scottish Highlands ; every swell of 
the rolling prairie offered a possible surprise, 
and I had some of the stirring sensations of a 
moss-trooper. Never before in my life had I 
been, distinctively and unequivocally, outside 
of the world of human law ; it had been ready 
to protect me, even when I disobeyed it. Here 
it had ceased to exist ; my Sharp's rifle, my re- 
volvers, — or, these failing, my own ingenuity 
and ready wit, — were all the protection I had. 
It was a delightful sensation ; I could quote to 
myself from Browning's magnificent soliloquy 
in " Colombe's Birthday : " — 

" When is man strong until he feels alone ? " 

and there came to mind some thrilling pas- 
sages from Mackay's " Ballads of the Cavaliers 
and Roundheads " or from the " Jacobite Min- 
strelsy." On this very track a carrier had been 
waylai(i and killed by the Missourians only a few 
days before. The clear air, the fresh breeze, 
gave an invigorating delight, impaired by no- 
thing but the yellow and muddy streams of that 
region, which seemed to my New England eye 
such a poor accompaniment for the land of the 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 203 

free. Tabor itself was then known far and wide 
as a Free State town, from the warm sympathy 
of its people for the struggles of their neigh- 
bors, and I met there with the heartiest encour- 
agement, and had an escort back. 

The tavern where I lodged in Nebraska City 
was miserable enough ; the beds being fear- 
fully dirty, the food indigestible, and the table 
eagerly beset by three successive relays of men. 
One day a commotion took place in the street : 
people ran out to the doors ; and some thirty 
rough-riders came cantering up to the hostelry. 
They might have been border raiders for all 
appearance of cavalry order : some rode horses, 
some mules ; some had bridles, others had lari- 
ats of rope ; one man had on a slight semblance 
of uniform, and seemed a sort of lieutenant. 
The leader was a thin man of middle age, in 
a gray woolen shirt, with keen eyes, smooth 
tongue, and a suggestion of courteous and even 
fascinating manners ; a sort of Prince Rupert of 
humbler grade. This was the then celebrated 
Jim Lane, afterwards Senator James H. Lane, 
of the United States Congress ; at this time 
calling himself only " Major-Gen eral command- 
ing the Free State Forces of Kansas." He 
was now retreating from the Territory with 
his men, in deference to the orders of the new 
United States governor, Geary, who was making 



204 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

an attempt, more or less serious, to clear Kansas 
of all armed bands. Lane stopped two days in 
Nebraska City, and I did something towards 
renewing the clothing of his band. He made 
a speech to the citizens of the town, — they 
being then half balanced between anti-slavery 
and pro-slavery sympathies, — and I have sel- 
dom heard eloquence more thrilling, more tact- 
ful, better adjusted to the occasion. Ralph 
Waldo Emerson, I remember, was much im- 
pressed by a report of this speech as sent by 
me to some Boston newspaper. Lane went with 
me, I think, to see our emigrants, encamped near 
by ; gave me some capital suggestions as to our 
march into the Territory ; and ended by hand- 
ing me a bit of crumpled paper, appointing me 
a member of his staff with the rank of brigadier- 
general. 

As I rode out of Nebraska City on the 
march, next day, my companion, Samuel F. 
Tappan, riding at my side, took occasion to ex- 
hibit casually a similar bit of paper in his own 
possession ; and we thus found that the Kan- 
sas guerrilla leader carried out the habit of 
partisan chiefs in all history, who have usually 
made up in titles and honors what they could 
not bestow in actual emoluments. After this 
discovery Tappan and I rode on in conscious 
inward importance, a sort of dignity a deux, 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 205 

yet not knowing but that at any moment some 
third brigadier-general might cross our path. 
We accompanied and partially directed the 
march of about a hundred and sixty men, with 
some twenty women and children. There were 
twenty-eight wagons, all but eight being drawn 
by horses. The nightly tents made quite an 
imposing encampment ; while some of the men 
fed and watered the stock, others brought wood 
from far and near, others cleaned their rifles, 
others prepared the wagons for sleeping ; the 
cooks fried pork and made bread ; women with 
their babies sat round the fire ; and a sad- 
dler brought out his board and leather every 
night and made belts and holsters for the emi- 
grants. Each man kept watch for an hour, 
striding in thick boots through the prairie grass 
heavy with frost. Danger had always to be 
guarded against, though we were never actually 
attacked ; and while we went towards Kan- 
sas, we met armed parties day after day flee- 
ing from it, hopeless of peace. When at last 
we reached the Kansas River, we found on its 
muddy banks nineteen wagons with emigrants, 
retreating with heavy hearts from the land of 
promise so eagerly sought two years before, 
" The Missourians could not conquer us," they 
said, " but Governor Geary has." 

On my first morning in Lawrence, Kansas, 



2o6 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

I waked before daybreak, and looking out saw 
the house surrounded by dragoons, each sit- 
ting silent on his horse. This again was a 
new experience in those ante-bellum days. A 
party of a hundred and fifty of these men had 
been sent to intercept us, we learned, under 
the command of Colonel Preston and Captain 
Walker of the United States Army ; the latter 
luckily being an old acquaintance of my own. 
As a result, I went with Charles Robinson, the 
Free State governor, and James Redpath for 
a half-amicable, half-compulsory interview with 
the actual governor, Geary ; and we parted, 
leaving everything undecided, — indeed, nothing 
ever seemed to be decided in Kansas ; the whole 
destiny of the Territory was one of drifting, 
until it finally drifted into freedom. Yet in 
view of the fact that certain rifles which we 
had brought, and which had been left at Tabor, 
Iowa, for future emergencies, were the same 
weapons which ultimately armed John Brown 
and his men at Harper's Ferry, it is plain that 
neither Governor Geary's solicitude nor the mil- 
itary expedition of Colonel Preston was at all 
misplaced. 

I formed that day a very unfavorable impres- 
sion of Governor Geary, and a favorable one of 
Governor Robinson, and lived to modify both 
opinions. The former, though vacillating in 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 207 

Kansas, did himself great credit afterwards in 
the Civil War ; while the latter did himself very 
little credit in Kansas politics, whose bitter 
hostilities and narrow vindictiveness he was 
the first to foster. Jealousy of the influence of 
Brown, Lane, and Montgomery led him in later 
years to be chiefly responsible for that curious 
myth concerning the Kansas conflict which has 
wholly taken possession of many minds, and 
has completely perverted the history of that 
State written by Professor Spring, — a theory 
to the effect that there existed from the begin- 
ning among the Free State people two well- 
defined parties, the one wishing to carry its 
ends by war, the other by peace. As a mat- 
ter of fact there was no such division. In re- 
gard to the most extreme act of John Brown's 
Kansas career, the so-called " Pottawatomie 
massacre" of May 24, 1856, I can testify that 
in September of that year there appeared to 
be but one way of thinking among the Kansas 
PVee State men, this being precisely the fact 
pointed out by Colonel William A. Phillips, in 
his " Conquest of Kansas," which is altogether 
the best and fairest book upon the confused 
history of that time and place. I heard of no 
one who did not approve of the act, and its 
beneficial effects were universally asserted, — 
Governor Robinson himself fully indorsing it 



2o8 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

to me, and maintaining, like the rest, that it 
had given an immediate check to the armed 
aggressions of the Missourians. 

It is certain that at a pubhc meeting held at 
Lawrence, Kansas, three years later (Decem- 
ber 15, 1859), Robinson supported resolutions 
saying that the act was done "from sad neces- 
sity;" that on August 30, 1877, at the unveiling 
of Brown's monument at Osawatomie, he com- 
pared Brown to Jesus Christ ; and that on Feb- 
ruary 5, 1878, he wrote in a letter to James 
Han way, "I never had much doubt that Cap- 
tain Brown was the author of the blow at Pot- 
tawatomie, for the reason that he was the only 
man who comprehended the situation and saw 
the absolute necessity of some such blow and 
had the nerve to strike it." Personally, I have 
never fully reconciled myself to this vindication 
of " the blow ; " but that Charles Robinson, 
after justifying it for nearly thirty years, and 
after the fighting men of the Territory (Brown, 
Lane, Montgomery) were dead, should have be- 
gun to pose as a non-resistant, and should later 
have spoken of " the punishment due Brown 
for his crimes in Kansas," — this appears to 
me to have been either simply disgraceful, or 
else the product of a disordered mind. 

The people in Lawrence had been passing 
through a variety of scenes of danger and dis- 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 209 

comfort before the arrival of our party ; and 
though the Missouri attacks had practically- 
ceased, their effects remained in the form of 
general poverty and of privations as to food, es- 
pecially as regarded breadstuffs. The hotel and 
Governor Robinson's house had been burned, 
as well as many mills and bridges ; some of 
the best citizens were in jail as prisoners of 
state, and their families were really suffering. 
When I visited these prisoners at Lecomp- 
ton, one man reported to me that he had left 
six children at home, all ill, and his wife acci- 
dentally away and unable to get back ; but he 
supposed that "some of the neighbors would 
look after them." Another had in his arms 
his crying baby, said to be the first child born 
in Lawrence, and named after the settlement. 
Such imprisonment was the lot of more than 
a hundred of the Free State men. In the 
more rural regions — though everything in 
Kansas was then rural, but treeless — there 
was a perpetual guerrilla warfare going on in 
a vague and desultory way ; and the parties 
were so far defined that their labels attached 
even to dumb animals, and people spoke of an 
anti-slavery colt or a pro-slavery cow. 

Several of us visited, near Blanton's Bridge, 
the ruins of a large mill, built by a Pennsylva- 
nian named Straub. We met there his daugh- 



210 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

ter, who was a noble -looking girl of twenty, 
but rather needlessly defiant in manner, as we 
thought, till at last she said frankly, " Why, I 
thought you were Missourians, and I was re- 
solved that you should hear the truth." We 
being three to one, this attitude was certainly 
plucky ; but I heard later that this girl had 
walked alone into the midst of the Missourians, 
while the mill was burning, and had called on 
one of them to give up her favorite horse which 
he had taken. This she did with such spirit 
that his comrades compelled him to dismount 
and surrender it. She mounted it and was 
riding away, when the man followed and at- 
tempted to get the halter from her hand ; she 
held on ; he took his bowie-knife and threatened 
to cut her hand off ; she dared him to do it ; 
he cut the rope close to her hand and got con- 
trol of the horse. She slipped off, defeated ; 
but presently two of the fellow's companions 
rode up and gave her the horse once more. It 
was a time when a horse was worth more than 
a life in Kansas, and we can estimate the com- 
pleteness of the triumph. 

As I had been urged to preach to the people 
of Lawrence, it seemed well to take for my text 
that which was employed by the Rev. John 
Martin on the Sunday after he had fought at 
Bunker Hill : " Be not ye afraid of them ; re- 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 211 

member the Lord, which is great and terri- 
ble, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and 
your daughters, your wives, and your houses." 
Riding a few days after to Leavenworth, then a 
" Border Ruffian " town, to witness an election 
under the auspices of that faction, I found my- 
self in a village provided with more than fifty 
liquor shops for two thousand inhabitants, while 
the doors of the hotel were almost barricaded 
with whiskey casks. Strangers were begged 
to take a hand in the voting, as if it were some- 
thing to drink ; I was several times asked to 
do this, and my plea that I was only a trav- 
eler was set aside as quite irrelevant. Many 
debated on the most available point at which 
to cast their pro- slavery votes — for the Free 
State men denied the validity of the election 
and would not vote at all — as coolly as a knot 
of village shopkeepers might debate whether 
to go to Boston or New York for purchases. 
Once the conversation began to grow rather 
personal. Said one man, just from Lecompton, 
" Tell you what, we 've found out one thing : 
there 's a preacher going about here preaching 
politics." "Fact.?" and "Is that so?" were 
echoed with virtuous indignation on all sides. 
"That's so," continued he, "and he fixes it 
this way : first, he has his text and preaches 
religion ; then he drops that and pitches into 



212 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

politics ; and then he drops that too, and begins 
about the sufferin' niggers " (this with ineffa- 
ble contempt). " And what 's more, he 's here 
in Leavenworth now," " What 's his name ? " 
exclaimed several eagerly, " Just what I don't 
know," was the sorrowful reply, "and I should 
n't know him if I saw him ; but he 's here, 
boys, and in a day or two there '11 be some gen- 
tlemen here that know him," (At my last 
speech in Lawrence I had been warned that 
three Missouri spies were present.) " It 's well 
we've got him here, to take care of him," said 
one, "Won't our boys enjoy running him out 
of town ? " added another affectionately ; while 
I listened with dubious enjoyment, thinking 
that I might perhaps afford useful informa- 
tion. But the "gentlemen " did not appear, or 
else were in search of higher game ; and I was 
to leave town that night, at any rate, for St, 
Louis. 

I took the steamer Cataract on October 9, 
1856, and went down the river ; my chief com- 
panions being a large party of youths from 
Virginia and South Carolina, who had come 
into the Territory of Kansas confessedly to 
take a hand in the election, and also in the 
fighting, should a chance be offered. They 
were drunken, gambling, quarrelsome boys, but 
otherwise affable enough, with the pleasant 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 213 

manners and soft accent of the South. Nothing 
could be more naiVe than their confidences. 
" Don't you remember," said one, with a sort 
of tender regret, " how when we went up the 
river we were all of us drunk all the time .-• " 
" So we would be now," replied his friend 
sadly, " only we ain't got no money." They 
said that they had been inveigled into coming 
by Atchison and others, on the promise of 
support for a year and fifty dollars bonus, but 
that they had got neither, and had barely 
enough to take them to St. Louis. " Let me 
once get home," said the same youth who made 
the above confession, " and I 'd stay at home, 
sure. It has cost me the price of one good 
nigger just for board and liquor, since I left 
home." Curiously enough, in reading a copy 
of Mrs, Stowe's "Dred," just published, which 
I had bought in Lawrence, I opened soon after 
on the apt Scriptural quotation, " Woe unto 
them, for they have cast lots for my people, 
. . . and sold a girl for wine, that they may 
drink ! " 

The few Free State men on board were 
naturally not aggressive, although we spent a 
whole day on a sand-bank, a thing not condu- 
cive to serenity of mind ; but the steamer 
which pulled us off had on board the secretary 
of the Kansas State Committee, Miles Moore, 



214 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

and there had been an effort to lynch him, 
prevented only by Governor Cobb, of Alabama, 
who was on the boat. Renewal of hostilities 
being threatened, I invited Moore on board the 
Cataract at Jefferson City, where we lay over- 
night. He and I barricaded ourselves in my 
stateroom, with our revolvers ready, but heard 
only occasional threats from outside ; there 
was no actual assault. When we reached St. 
Louis, — after more than four days on board 
the steamboat, — and I finally discharged my 
revolver and put it away in my trunk, there 
occurred the most curious reaction from the 
feeling with which I had first loaded it. When 
it fully came home to me that all the tonic 
life of the last six weeks was ended, and that 
thenceforward, if any danger impended, the 
proper thing would be to look meekly about 
for a policeman, it seemed as if all the vigor 
had suddenly gone out of me, and a despicable 
effeminacy had set in. I could at that moment 
perfectly understand how Rob Roy, wishing to 
repay a debt he owed to the Edinburgh pro- 
fessor, offered to take his benefactor's son back 
into the Highlands "and make a man of him." 
In twenty-four hours, however, civilization reas- 
sumed its force, and Kansas appeared as far off 
as Culloden. 

After returning home, I kept up for a long 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 215 

time an active correspondence with some of 
the leading Kansas men, including Montgom- 
ery, Hinton, my old ally Martin Stowell, and 
my associate brigadier, Samuel F. Tappan, after- 
wards lieutenant-colonel of the First Colorado 
Cavalry. Some of these wrote and received 
letters under feigned names, because many of 
the post-offices in the Territory were in the 
hands of pro-slavery men who were suspected of 
tampering with correspondence, I also spoke 
on Kansas matters by request, before the legis- 
latures of Massachusetts and Vermont, and was 
nominated by the Worcester Republicans for 
the state legislature on the issue of Kansas 
sympathy ; but declined, feeling that I must at 
length recognize the claim of the Free Church 
on my attention. I was brought much in con- 
tact with that noble and self -devoted man, 
George Luther Stearns, of Medford, who gave, 
first and last, ten thousand dollars to maintain 
liberty in the new Territory ; and also with Dr. 
Howe and Frank Sanborn, then the leading 
men in the Massachusetts Kansas Committee. 
In looking back on the inevitable confusion of 
that period, and the strange way in which men 
who had been heroic in danger grew demoral- 
ized in politics, I have often recalled as true 
the remark made by Sanborn, that it was diffi- 
cult for a man to have much to do with the 



2i6 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

affairs of Kansas, even at long range, without 
developing a crack in his brain. 

It will doubtless seem to some readers a 
very natural transition to pass from this asser- 
tion to the later events which brought some of 
the above-named men into intimate relations 
with Captain John Brown. It has never been 
quite clear to me whether I saw him in Kansas 
or not ; he was then in hiding, and I remem- 
ber to have been taken somewhat covertly to 
a house in Lawrence, for an interview with a 
fugitive slave who was being sheltered by a 
white man ; and though this man's name, which 
I have forgotten, was certainly not Brown, it 
may have been one of Brown's aliases. My 
first conscious acquaintance with that leader 
was nearly a year and a half later, when I re- 
ceived from him this communication, implying, 
as will be seen, that we had met before : — 

Rochester, N. Y. 2d FeFy, 1858. 
My dear Sir, — I am here concealing my 
whereabouts for good reasons (as I think) not 
however from any anxiety about my personal 
safety. I have been told that you are both a 
true man: and a true abolitionist; "and I 
partly believe," the whole story. Last fall I 
undertook to raise from ^500 to $1000, for 
secret service, and succeeded in getting ;^500. 






KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 217 

I now want to get for the perfecting of by far 
the most important undertaking of my whole 
life ; from ^500 to ^800 within the next sixty 
days. I have written Rev. Theodore Parker, 
George L. Stearns and F. B. Sanborn Esqrs. 
on the subject ; but do not know as either Mr. 
Steams or Mr. Sanborn are abolitionists. I 
suppose they are. Can you be induced to op- 
perate at Worcester and elsewhere during that 
time to raise from «;?/z-slavery men and wo- 
men (or any other parties) some part of that 
amount } I wish to keep it entirely still about 
where I am ; and will be greatly obliged if you 
will consider this communication strictly confi- 
dential: unless it may be with such as you are 
sure will feel and act and keep very still. Please 
be so kind as to write N. Hawkins on the sub- 
ject, Care of Wm. I. Watkins, Esqr. Rochester, 
N. Y. Should be most happy to meet you 
again ; and talk matters more freely. Hope 
this is my last effort in the begging line. 
Very Respectfully your Friend, 

John Brown. 

This name, " N. Hawkins," was Brown's 
favorite alias. The phrase "partly believe" 
was a bit of newspaper slang of that period, 
but came originally from Paul's First Epistle to 
the Corinthians (xi. 18) whence Brown may well 



, X 



2i8 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

have taken it. I wrote in return, wishing for 
farther information, and asking if the " under- 
ground railroad " business was what he had in 
view. In a few days came this reply : — 

Rochester, N. Y. \2th Feby, 1858. 
My dear Sir, — I have just read your kind 
letter of the 8th inst., and will now say that 
Rail Road business on a somewhat extended 
scale is the identical object for which I am try- 
ing to get means. I have been connected with 
that business as commonly conducted from my 
boyhood and never \t\. an opportunity slip. I 
have been opperating to some purpose the past 
season ; but I now have a measure on foot that 
I feel sure would awaken in you something 
more than a common interest if you could un- 
derstand it. I have just written my friends 
G. L. Stearns and F. B. Sanborn asking them 
to meet me for consultation at Gerrit Smith's, 
Peterboro' [N. Y.]. I am very anxious to have 
you come along ; certain as I feel, that you will 
never regret having been one of the council. I 
would most gladly pay your expenses had I the 
means to spare. Will you come on? Please 
write as before. 

Your Friend John Brown. 

As I could not go to Peterboro', he made an 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 219 

appointment in Boston, and I met him in his 
room at the American House in March, 1858. 
I saw before me a man whose mere appearance 
and bearing refuted in advance some of the 
strange perversions which have found their way 
into many books, and which have often wholly 
missed the type to which he belonged. In his 
thin, worn, resolute face there were the signs 
of a fire which might wear him out, and practi- 
cally did so, but nothing of pettiness or base- 
ness ; and his talk was calm, persuasive, and 
coherent. He was simply a high-minded, un- 
selfish, belated Covenanter ; a man whom Sir 
Walter Scott might have drawn, but whom such 
writers as Nicolay and Hay, for instance, have 
utterly failed to delineate. To describe him in 
their words as " clean but coarse " is curiously 
wide of the mark ; he had no more of coarseness 
than was to be found in Habakkuk Muckle- 
wrath or in George Eliot's Adam Bede ; he 
had, on the contrary, that religious elevation 
which is itself a kind of refinement, — the 
quality one may see expressed in many a ven- 
erable Quaker face at yearly meeting. Coarse- 
ness absolutely repelled him ; he was so strict 
as to the demeanor of his men that his band 
was always kept small, while that of Lane was 
large ; he had little humor, and none of the hu- 
morist's temptation towards questionable con- 



220 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

versation. Again, to call him "ambitious to 
irritation," in the words of the same authors, 
is equally wide of the mark. I saw him after- 
wards deeply disappointed and thwarted, and 
this long before his final failure, but never 
could find in him a trace of mere ambition ; 
he lived, as he finally died, absolutely absorbed 
in one idea ; and it is as a pure enthusiast — 
fanatic, if you please — that he is to be judged. 
His belief was that an all-seeing God had cre- 
ated the Alleghany Mountains from all eternity 
as the predestined refuge for a body of fugi- 
tive slaves. He had traversed those mountains 
in his youth, as a surveyor, and knew points 
which could be held by a hundred men against 
a thousand ; he showed me rough charts of some 
of those localities and plans of connected moun- 
tain fortresses which he had devised. 

Of grand tactics and strategy Brown knew 
as little as Garibaldi ; but he had studied guer- 
rilla warfare for himself in books, as well as in 
Europe, and had for a preceptor Hugh Forbes, 
an Englishman who had been a Garibaldian 
soldier. Brown's plan was simply to penetrate 
Virginia with a few comrades, to keep utterly 
clear of all attempt to create slave insurrection, 
but to get together bands and families of fugi- 
tive slaves, and then be guided by events. If 
he could establish them permanently in those 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 221 

fastnesses, like the Maroons of Jamaica and 
Surinam, so much the better ; if not, he would 
make a break from time to time, and take par- 
ties to Canada, by paths already familiar to 
him. All this he explained to me and others, 
plainly and calmly, and there was nothing in 
it that we considered either objectionable or 
impracticable ; so that his friends in Boston — 
Theodore Parker, Howe, Stearns, Sanborn, and 
myself — were ready to cooperate in his plan 
as thus limited. Of the wider organization 
and membership afterwards formed by him in 
Canada we of course knew nothing, nor could 
we foresee the imprudence which finally per- 
verted the attack into a defeat. We helped 
him in raising the money, and he seemed draw- 
ing toward the consummation of his plans, 
when letters began to come to his Massachu- 
setts supporters from Hugh Forbes, already 
mentioned, threatening to make the whole mat- 
ter public unless we could satisfy certain very un- 
reasonable demands for money. On this point 
our committee was at once divided, not as to re- 
fusing the preposterous demands, but because 
the majority thought that this threat of disclo- 
sure made necessary an indefinite postponement 
of the whole affair ; while Howe and myself, and 
Brown also, as it proved, thought otherwise. 
He came again to Boston (May 31, 1858), 



222 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

when I talked with him alone, and he held, as 
I had done, that Forbes could do him no real 
harm ; that if people believed Forbes they 
would underrate his (Brown's) strength, which 
was just the thing he wished ; or if they over- 
rated it, "the increased terror would perhaps 
counterbalance this." If he had the means, 
he would not lose a day. But as I could not, 
unaided, provide the means, I was obliged to 
yield, as he did. He consented to postpone 
the enterprise and return to Kansas, carrying 
with him $500 in gold, and an order for certain 
arms at Tabor, which had belonged originally 
to the State Kansas Committee, but had since 
been transferred, in consideration of a debt, to 
our friend Stearns, who gave them to Brown 
on his own responsibility. Nearly a year now 
passed, during which I rarely heard from Brown, 
and thought that perhaps his whole project 
had been abandoned. A new effort to raise 
money was made at Boston in the spring of 
1859, but I took little part in it. It had all 
begun to seem to me rather chimerical. The 
amount of ;^2000 was, nevertheless, raised for 
him at Boston, in June, 1859, ^^^ ^ ^"^ ^^^^ 
Sanborn wrote to me (June 4), " Brown has 
set out on his expedition ; " and then on Octo- 
ber 6, " The ^300 desired has been made up 
and received. Four or five men will be on the 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 223 

ground next week from these regions and else- 
where." Brown's address was at this time at 
West Andover, Ohio, and the impression was 
that the foray would begin in that region, if at 
all. Nobody mentioned Harper's Ferry. 

Ten days later the blow came. I went into 
a newspaper shop in Worcester one morning, 
and heard some one remark casually, " Old 
Osawatomie Brown has got himself into a tight 
place at last." I grasped eagerly at the morn- 
ing paper, and read the whole story. Natu- 
rally, my first feeling was one of remorse, that 
the men who had given him money and arms 
should not actually have been by his side. In 
my own case, however, the justification was 
perfectly clear. Repeated postponements had 
taken the edge off from expectation, and the 
whole enterprise had grown rather vague and 
dubious in my mind. I certainly had not that 
degree of faith in it which would have led me 
to abandon all else, and wait nearly a year and 
a half for the opportunity of fulfillment ; and 
indeed it became obvious at last that this longer 
postponement had somewhat disturbed the deli- 
cate balance of the zealot's mind, and had made 
him, at the very outset, defy the whole power 
of the United States government, and that 
within easy reach of Washington. Nothing of 
this kind was included in his original plans. 



224 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

At any rate, since we were not with him, the 
first question was what part we were now to 
take. It will be remembered that the explo- 
sion of the Brown affair caused at once a vast 
amount of inquiry at Washington, and many 
were the threats of prosecuting Brown's previ- 
ous friends and supporters. There was some 
talk of flight to Canada, and one or two of 
these persons actually went thither or to Eu- 
rope. It always seemed to me undesirable to 
do this ; it rather looked as if, having befriended 
Brown's plans so far as we understood them, 
it was our duty to stand our ground and give 
him our moral support, at least on the witness- 
stand. This view was perhaps easier for me to 
take, as my name was only incidentally men- 
tioned in the newspapers ; and it is only within 
a few months that I have discovered that it 
had been early brought, with that of Sanborn, 
to the express attention of Governor Wise, of 
Virginia. Among his papers captured at Rich- 
mond by Major James Savage, of the Second 
Massachusetts Infantry, was this anonymous 
letter, received by the Virginia governor, and 
indorsed by him for transmission to some one 
else, probably in Congress, — but perhaps never 
forwarded. It read as follows : " There are 
two persons in Massachusetts, and I think only 
two, who, if summoned as witnesses, can ex- 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 225 

plain the whole of Brown's plot. Their names 
are Francis B. Sanborn, of Concord, and T. 
W. Higginson, of Worcester, Mass. No time 
should be lost, as they may abscond, but I do 
not think they will, as they think you would 
not think it best to send for them. A Friend 
of Order." This was indorsed "A Friend to 
Gov. Wise, Oct., 1859. Call attention to this." 
And just below, " Sent to me, now sent to 
you for what it is worth. Richmond, Oct. 29, 
H. A. W. [Henry A. Wise.] A. Huntin [pre- 
sumably the name of a secretary]." 

This communication was written during the 
trial of Captain Brown, and a few days before 
his sentence, which was pronounced on Novem- 
ber 2. It is hard to say whether it had any 
direct bearing on the arrest of Sanborn at Con- 
cord in the following April. It is very prob- 
able that it had, and if so, his arrest, had it been 
sustained by the court, might have been fol- 
lowed by mine ; but it would have been quite 
superfluous, for I should at any time have been 
ready to go if summoned, and should, in fact, 
have thought it rather due to the memory of 
Brown. I could at least have made it plain 
that anything like slave insurrection, in the or- 
dinary sense of the word, was remote from his 
thoughts, and that his plan was wholly different. 
He would have limited himself to advising a 



226 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

fugitive slave, if intercepted, to shoot down any 
one who attempted to arrest him ; and this ad- 
vice would have been given by every Abolition- 
ist, unless a non-resistant. 

There was, of course, an immediate impulse 
to rescue Brown from prison. I do not know 
how far this extended, and can only vouch for 
myself. The primary obstacle to it was that 
one of Brown's first acts, on meeting a North- 
ern friend in his prison, had been positively to 
prohibit any such attempt ; the message being 
sent North by Judge Thomas Russell, from 
whom I received it at the railway station on his 
arrival. This barred the way effectually, for 
after Brown had taken that position he would 
have adhered to it. It occurred to me, how- 
ever, that his wife's presence would move him, 
if anything could, and that she might also be 
a valuable medium of communication, should he 
finally yield to the wishes of his friends. For 
this purpose I went to North Elba, New York, 
the mountain home of the Browns, to fetch her, 
and wrote, after that memorable trip, a full ac- 
count of it, which was prefixed to Redpath's 
" Life of Brown." Upon entering for the first 
time the superb scenery of the Adirondacks, I 
saw myself in a region which was a fit setting 
for the heroic family to be visited. I found 
them poor, abstemious, patient, unflinching. 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 227 

They felt that the men of their household had 
given their lives for freedom, and there was no 
weak regret, no wish to hold them back. In 
the family was Annie Brown, who had been 
with the conspirators in Virginia, and had kept 
house and cooked for them. There were also 
the widows of the two slain sons, young girls 
of sixteen and twenty, one of them having also 
lost two brothers at Harper's Ferry. It illus- 
trates the frugal way in which the Browns had 
lived that the younger of these two widows was 
not regarded by the household as being abso- 
lutely destitute, because her husband had left 
her five sheep, valued at two dollars apiece. 

On my return, Mrs. Brown the elder rode 
with me for a whole day on a buckboard to 
Keeseville, and I had much talk with her. I 
have never in my life been in contact with a 
nature more dignified and noble ; a Roman 
matron touched with the finer element of Chris- 
tianity. She told me that this plan had occu- 
pied her husband's thoughts and prayers for 
twenty years ; that he always believed himself 
an instrument in the hands of Providence, and 
she believed it too. She had always prayed 
that he might be killed in fight rather than fall 
into the hands of slaveholders, but she " could 
not regret it now, in view of the noble words 
of freedom which it had been his privilege to 



228 ' CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

Utter." She also said, " I have had thirteen 
children, and only four are left ; but if I am to 
see the ruin of my house, I cannot but hope that 
Providence may bring out of it some benefit 
for the poor slaves." She little foresaw how, 
within two years, her dead husband's name 
would ring through the defiles of the Virginia 
mountains in the songs of the Union soldiers. 
When, the next day, I had to put into her 
hands, in the railway-car, the newspaper contain- 
ing his death-warrant, she bent her head for a 
few moments on the back of the seat before us, 
and then lifted it again unchanged. Her errand 
was absolutely in vain. Brown refusing even to 
see her, possibly distrusting his own firmness, 
or wishing to put it above all possibility of peril ; 
and she returned to her mountain home. 

Meanwhile, one of the few of his band who 
had escaped had come to my door one day in 
Worcester. When he reached my house, he 
appeared utterly demented after the danger 
and privations of his flight through the moun- 
tains. He could not speak two coherent sen- 
tences, and I was grateful when, after twenty- 
four hours, I could send him to his friends in 
Boston. Another and far abler refugee from 
Harper's Ferry was Charles Plummer Tidd, 
one of our Worcester emigrants, — afterwards 
well known as Sergeant Charles Plummer of 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 229 

the Twenty - First Massachusetts, — who told 
me, in an interview on February 10, i860, of 
which I still preserve the written record, " All 
the boys opposed Harper's Ferry, the younger 
Browns most of all. In September it nearly 
broke up the camp. He himself [Tidd] left, 
almost quarreling with Brown. Finally, when 
they consented, it was with the agreement that 
men should be sent in each direction to burn 
bridges ;" which was not done, however. Tidd 
pronounced the Harper's Ferry attack "the 
only mistake Brown ever made," and attributed 
it, as it is now generally assigned, to a final loss 
of mental balance from overbrooding on one 
idea. Brown's general project he still heartily 
indorsed ; saying that the Virginia mountains 
were " the best guerrilla country in the world," 
— all crags and dense laurel thickets ; that 
"twenty -five men there could paralyze the 
whole business of the South," and that "no- 
body could take them." The negroes, he said, 
had proved ready enough to follow Brown, but 
naturally slipped back to their masters when 
they saw that the enterprise was to fail. 

The same question of a rescue presented it- 
self, after Captain Brown's execution, in regard 
to the two members of his party whose trial 
and conviction took place two months later, — 
Stevens and Hazlett, the former of whom I had 



230 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

met with Lane's party in Kansas. In Feb- 
ruary, i860, after urgent appeals from Mrs. Re- 
becca Spring, of New York, who had visited 
these men, I made up my mind to use for 
their reUef a portion of certain funds placed 
in my hands for the benefit of the Brown fam- 
ily ; first, of course, consulting Mrs. Brown, 
who fully approved. Thayer and Eldridge, 
two young publishers in Boston, also took an 
interest in raising funds for this purpose ; and 
the fact is fixed in my memory by the cir- 
cumstance that, on visiting their shop one day, 
during the negotiations, I met for the first 
and only time Walt Whitman. He was there 
to consult them about the publication of his 
poems, and I saw before me, sitting on the 
counter, a handsome, burly man, heavily built, 
and not looking, to my gymnasium-trained eye, 
in really good condition for athletic work. I 
perhaps felt a little prejudiced against him from 
having read his " Leaves of Grass " on a voy- 
age, in the early stages of seasickness, — a fact 
which doubtless increased for me the intrinsic 
unsavoriness of certain passages. But the per- 
sonal impression made on me by the poet was 
not so much of manliness as of Boweriness, if I 
may coin the phrase ; indeed rather suggesting 
Sidney Lanier's subsequent vigorous phrase, 
"a dandy roustabout." This passing impres- 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 231 

sion did not hinder me from thinking of Whit- 
man with hope and satisfaction at a later day 
when regiments were to be raised for the war, 
when the Bowery seemed the very place to 
enlist them, and even "Billy Wilson's Zou- 
aves" were hailed with delight. When, how- 
ever, after waiting a year or more, Whitman de- 
cided that the proper post for him was hospital 
service, I confess to feeling a reaction, which was 
rather increased than diminished by his profuse 
celebration of his own labors in that direction. 
Hospital attendance is a fine thing, no doubt, 
yet if all men, South and North, had taken the 
same view of their duty that Whitman held, 
there would have been no occasion for hospi- 
tals on either side. 

The only persons beside myself who were 
intimately acquainted with the project formed 
for rescuing Stevens and Hazlett were Richard 
H. Hinton, already mentioned, and John W. 
LeBarnes, afterwards lieutenant of a German 
company in the Second Massachusetts Infantry 
during the Civil War. It was decided that an 
attempt at rescue could best be made from 
a rendezvous at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and 
that Hinton should go to Kansas, supplied with 
money by LeBarnes and myself, to get the co- 
operation of Captain James Montgomery and 
eight or ten tried and trusty men. I was to 



232 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

meet these men at Harrisburg, while LeBarnes 
was to secure a reinforcement of German- 
Americans, among whom he had much influ- 
ence, from New York. Only one man in Har- 
risburg, an active Abolitionist, knew of our 
purpose, and I met Montgomery at this man's 
house, after taking up my own residence, on 
February 17, i860, at the United States Hotel, 
under the name of Charles P. Carter. I had 
met the guerrilla leader once before in Kansas, 
and we now consulted about the expedition, 
which presented no ordinary obstacles. 

The enterprise would involve traversing fifty 
miles of mountain country by night, at the rate 
of about ten miles each night, carrying arms, 
ammunition, blankets, and a week's rations, 
with the frequent necessity of camping without 
fire in February, and with the certainty of detec- 
tion in case of snow. It would include cross- 
ing the Potomac, possibly at a point where 
there was neither a bridge nor a ford. It would 
culminate in an attack on a building with a 
wall fourteen feet high, with two sentinels out- 
side and twenty-five inside ; with a certainty of 
raising the town in the process, and then, if 
successful, with the need of retreating, perhaps 
with wounded men and probably by daylight. 
These were the difficulties that Montgomery, 
as our leader, had to face ; and although, in 



KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 233 

Kansas, he had taken Fort Scott with twenty- 
two men against sixty-eight, yet this was quite a 
different affair. For myself, I had at that time 
such confidence in his guidance that the words 
of the Scotch ballad often rang in my ears : — 

" I could ha'e ridden the border through 
Had Christie Graeme been at my baclc." 

Lithe, quick, low -voiced, reticent, keen, he 
seemed the ideal of a partisan leader, and was, 
indeed, a curious compound of the moss-trooper 
and the detective. Among his men were Car- 
penter, Pike, Seamans, Rice, Gardner, Willis, 
and Silas Soule, — all well known in Kansas. 
The last three of these men had lately been 
among the rescuers of Dr. Doy from jail at St. 
Joseph, Missouri, — a town of eleven thousand 
inhabitants, — under circumstances of peculiar 
daring ; one of them personating a horse-thief 
and two others the officers who had arrested 
him, and thus getting admission to the jail. 

The first need was to make exploration of 
the localities, and, taking with him one of his 
companions, — a man, as it proved, of great 
resources, — Montgomery set out by night and 
was gone several days. While he examined 
the whole region, — his native Kentucky accent 
saving him from all suspicion, — his comrade 
penetrated into the very jail, in the guise of 
a jovial, half-drunken Irishman, and got speech 



234 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

with the prisoners, who were thus notified of 
the proposed rescue. They expressed great 
distrust of it, and this partly because, even if 
successful, it would endanger the life of the 
jailer, Avis, who had won their gratitude, as 
well as Brown's, by his great kindness. I have 
never known whether this opposition had any 
covert influence on the mind of Montgomery, 
but I know that he came back at last, and 
quenched all our hopes by deciding that a se- 
vere snowstorm which had just occurred ren- 
dered the enterprise absolutely hopeless. I 
was not at the time quite satisfied with this 
opinion, but it was impossible to overrule our 
leader ; and on visiting that region and the jail 
itself, many years later, I was forced to believe 
him wholly right. At any rate, it was decided 
by vote of the party to abandon the expedition, 
and the men were sent back to Kansas, their 
arms being forwarded to Worcester, while I 
went to Antioch, Ohio, to give a promised lec- 
ture to the college students, and then returned 
home. I now recognize how almost hopeless 
the whole enterprise had appeared in my own 
mind : the first entry in my notebook, after 
returning (March i, i860), is headed with the 
words of that celebrated message in the First 
Book of Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities," — 
"Recalled to Life." 



VIII 

CIVIL WAR 

" Black faces in the camp 
Where moved those peerless brows and eyes of old." 

Browning's Ltiria. 

From the time of my Kansas visit I never 
had doubted that a farther conflict of some sort 
was impending. The absolute and increasing 
difference between the two sections of the na- 
tion had been most deeply impressed upon me 
by my first and only visit to a slave-mart. On 
one of my trips to St. Louis I had sought John 
Lynch's slave-dealing establishment, following 
an advertisement in a newspaper, and had 
found a yard full of men and women strolling 
listlessly about and waiting to be sold. The 
proprietor, looking like a slovenly horse-dealer, 
readily explained to me their condition and 
value. Presently a planter came in, having 
been sent on an errand to buy a little girl to 
wait on his wife ; stating this as easily and nat- 
urally as if he had been sent for a skein of 
yarn. Mr. Lynch called in three sisters, the 
oldest perhaps eleven or twelve, — nice little 



236 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

mulatto girls in neat pink calico frocks suggest- 
ing a careful mother. Some question being 
asked, Mr. Lynch responded cheerfully, " Strip 
her and examine for yourself. I never have 
any secrets from my customers." This cere- 
mony being waived, the eldest was chosen ; 
and the planter, patting her on the head kindly 
enough, asked, " Don't you want to go with 
me.-*" when the child, bursting into a flood of 
tears, said, ** I want to stay with my mother." 
Mr. Lynch's face ceased to be good-natured 
when he ordered the children to go out, but 
the bargain was finally completed. It was an 
epitome of slavery ; the perfectly matter-of-fact 
character of the transaction, and the circum- 
stance that those before me did not seem 
exceptionally cruel men, made the whole thing 
more terrible. I was beholding a case, not 
of special outrage, but of every-day business, 
which was worse. If these were the common- 
places of the institution, what must its excep- 
tional tragedies be .'* 

With such an experience in my mind, and 
the fact everywhere \dsible in Kansas of the 
armed antagonism of the Free State and pro- 
slavery parties, I readily shared the feeling — 
then more widely spread than we can now 
easily recall — of the possible necessity of ac- 
cepting the disunion forced upon us by the 



CIVIL WAR 237 

apparently triumphant career of the slave 
power. It was a period when Banks had said, 
in a speech in ]\Iaine, that it might be needful, 
in a certain contingency, "to let the Union 
slide ; " and when Whittier had written in the 
original form of his poem on Texas, — 

" Make our Union-bond a chain, 
We will snap its links in twain, 
We will stand erect again ! " 

These men were not Garrisonians or theoreti- 
cal disunionists, but the pressure of events 
seemed, for the moment, to be dri\ing us all in 
their direction. 

I find that at the jubilant twenty-fifth anni- 
versary of the founding of the Massachusetts 
Anti-Slavery Society (January 2, 1857) I said, 
in Faneuil Hall, "To-morrow may call us to 
some work so stern that the joys of this even- 
ing will seem years away. To-morrow may 
make this evening only the revelry by night 
before Waterloo." Under this con\iction I 
took an active part with the late Francis W. 
Bird and a few other Republicans and some 
Garrisonian Abolitionists in calling a state dis- 
union convention at Worcester on January 15, 
1857; but the Republican party was by no 
means ready for a movement so extreme, though 
some of its leaders admitted frankly that it was 
well for the North to suggest that freedom was 



338 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

more valuable than even the Union. The Kan- 
sas question, it must be remembered, was yet 
impending, and it was obviously possible that it 
might result in another Slave State, leading the 
way to others still. Moreover, passports were 
now for the first time refused to free colored 
men, under the Taney decision, on the ground 
of their not being citizens of the nation. It 
was also understood that, under this decision, 
slaveholders would be protected by the Su- 
preme Court in carrying their slaves with them 
into Free States and holding them there. Such 
things accounted for the temporary develop- 
ment of a Northern disunion feeling about that 
time ; and a national convention at Cleveland, 
following the state convention, had been fully 
planned by a committee of which I was chair- 
man, — the call for this receiving the names 
of more than six thousand signers, representing 
all of the Free States, — when there came the 
formidable financial panic which made the year 
1857 so memorable. As this calamity had be- 
gun in Ohio, and was felt most severely there, 
it was decided that the convention should be 
postponed, and this, as it proved, forever. 

In the following year Senator Seward made 
his great speech in which he accepted fully the 
attitude, which was the basis of our position, 
that the whole anti-slavery contest was a thing 



CIVIL WAR 239 

inevitable, — " an irrepressible conflict between 
opposing and enduring forces," — and that the 
United States must and would "sooner or later 
become entirely a slave-holding nation or en- 
tirely a free labor nation." Either, Seward 
said, the plantations of the South must ulti- 
mately be tilled by free men, or the farms of 
Massachusetts and New York must be surren- 
dered to the rearing of slaves ; there could 
be no middle ground. Lincoln had said, in the 
controversy with Douglas, "A house divided 
against itself cannot stand." In view of these 
suggestions, some of us were for accepting the 
situation, after our fashion, and found ourselves 
imitating that first mate of a vessel, who, see- 
ing her to be in danger, and being bidden by 
his captain to go forward and attend to his 
own part of the ship, came aft again presently, 

touched his cap, and said, " Captain , my 

part of the ship is at anchor." It was doubt- 
less well that the march of events proved too 
strong for us, and that the union feeling itself 
was finally aroused to do a work which the anti- 
slavery purpose alone could not have accom- 
plished ; yet we acted at the time according to 
our light, and we know from the testimony of 
Lincoln himself that it was the New England 
Abolitionists from whom he learned that love 
of liberty which at last made him turn the scale. 



240 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

Then came the John Brown affair, as de- 
scribed in a previous chapter; and there fol- 
lowed after this, in the winter of i860, a curi- 
ous outbreak in New England itself of the old 
proscriptive feeling. There ensued an interval 
when the Boston Abolitionists were again called 
upon to combine, in order to prevent public 
meetings from being broken up and the house 
of Wendell Phillips from being mobbed. Phil- 
lips was speaking at that time on Sundays at 
the Boston Music Hall, and it was necessary 
to protect the assembly by getting men to act 
together, under orders, and guard the various 
approaches to the hall. I was placed at the 
head of a company formed for this purpose, 
and it was strange to find how little advance 
had been made beyond the old perplexity in 
organizing reformers. There was more will- 
ingness to arm than formerly, but that was 
all. Mr. George W. Smalley has lately given 
a graphic description of that period, and has 
described those lovers of freedom as being 
"well organized;" but he was not wholly in 
a position to judge, because he and another 
young man — the John W. LeBarnes already 
mentioned in connection with the abortive 
Virginia foray — had chivalrously constituted 
themselves the body-guard of Wendell Phillips, 
and were at his side day and night, thus being 



CIVIL WAR 241 

in a manner on special service. Their part of 
the work being so well done, they may naturally 
have supposed the rest to be in an equally satis- 
factory condition ; but as a matter of fact the 
so-called organization was only the flimsiest 
shell. It consisted, while nominally under my 
command, of some forty men, half of these 
being Germans, half Americans : the Germans 
were inconveniently full of fight, and the Amer- 
icans hardly awakened to the possibility of it. 
After going through the form of posting my 
men at the numerous doors of the Music Hall, 
each as it were on picket duty, I almost always 
found, on visiting them half an hour later, that 
the Americans had taken comfortable seats in- 
side and were applauding the speakers, as if 
that were their main duty ; while the Germans 
had perhaps got into some high discussion in 
the corridors, ending in an exhibition of pistols 
and in being carried off by the police. Ex- 
postulating once with one of my nominal lieu- 
tenants, an American, I referred to a certain 
order as having been disregarded. " Oh," he 
said calmly, " that was an order, was it .-* I 
had viewed it in the light of a suggestion." In- 
asmuch as one or two public meetings had 
been broken up by gentlemen of property and 
standing, who at least obeyed the directions of 
the bully who led them, this attitude of the 



242 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

defenders seemed discouraging. It was too 
much like that croquet party in " AUce's Ad- 
ventures in Wonderland," where the game was 
disturbed by the fact that the attendants who 
were expected to stoop down and officiate as 
wickets kept constantly straightening them- 
selves up and walking away. 

I spent one night on guard at Phillips's 
house with his young henchmen, and was 
struck, then as before, with his high-bred bear- 
ing. Always aristocratic in aspect, he was 
never more so than when walking through the 
streets of his own Boston with a howling mob 
about him. It was hard to make him adopt 
ordinary precautions ; he did not care to have 
the police protect his house, and he would have 
gone to the scaffold if necessary, I firmly be- 
lieve, like the typical French marquis in the 
Reign of Terror, who took a pinch of snuff 
from his snuff-box while looking on the crowd. 
This was never more conspicuously the case 
than at the annual convention of the Massachu- 
setts Anti-Slavery Society, just after a meeting 
on the anniversary of John Brown's execution 
had been broken up by a mob of very much 
the same social grade with that which had for- 
merly mobbed Garrison. I did not happen to 
be present at the John Brown gathering, being 
in Worcester ; but at the larger convention 



CIVIL WAR 243 

(January 24, 1861), held at Tremont Temple, I 
was again in service with the same body of fol- 
lowers already described to defend the meet- 
ing and the speakers, if needful. The body of 
the hall was solidly filled with grave Abolition- 
ists and knitting women, but round the doors 
and galleries there was a noisy crowd of young 
fellows, mostly well dressed and many of them 
well educated, who contrived, by shouting and by 
singing uproarious songs, to drown the voices 
of the speakers, and to compel Phillips himself 
to edge in his sentences when the singers were 
out of breath. The favorite burden was, — 

" Tell John Andrew, 
Tell John Andrew, 
Tell John Andrew 
John Brown 's dead ; " 

with more ribald verses following. It was not 
many months before those who took part in 
the meeting and those who tried to suppress 
it were marching southward in uniform, elbow 
to elbow, singing a very different John Brown 
song. 

There was one moment during this session 
when it seemed as if an actual hand-to-hand 
conflict had come. There was a sudden move- 
ment at the doors, and a body of men came 
pressing toward the platform, along each of the 
aisles ; and I know that I, for one, had my 



244 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

hand on my revolver, when the invaders proved 
to be Mayor Wightman with aldermen and 
police, on an apparently peaceful mission. He 
turned and announced, however, that he came 
to dissolve the meeting by request of the trus- 
tees of the building. This being promptly de- 
nied by the trustees, who were present, and 
who compelled him to read their letter, it was 
shown that he had been requested to come 
and protect the assembly instead, — and this, 
with curious changeableness, he proceeded to 
attempt ; at least securing partial order, and 
stopping the mob from throwing down cush- 
ions and furniture from the galleries, which it 
had already begun to do. The speakers at this 
session were Phillips, Emerson, Clarke, and my- 
self, and it was on this occasion that Phillips 
uttered a remark which became historic. Turn- 
ing from the mob, which made him inaudible, 
he addressed himself wholly to the reporters, 
and said : " When I speak to these pencils, I 
speak to a million of men. . . . My voice is 
beaten by theirs [those of the mob], but they 
cannot beat types. All honor to Faust, for he 
made mobs impossible." At last the mayor 
promised the chairman, Edmund Quincy, to 
protect the evening session with fifty police- 
men ; but instead of this he finally prohibited 
it, and when I came, expecting to attend it, I 



CIVIL WAR 245 

found the doors closed by police, while numer- 
ous assailants, under their leader, Jonas H. 
French, were in possession of the outer halls. 
A portion of these, bent on mischief, soon set 
off in search of it among the quarters of the 
negroes near Charles Street, and I followed, 
wishing to stand by my friends in that way, if 
it could be done in no other. Lewis Hayden 
afterwards said that I should not have done 
this, for the negroes were armed, and would 
have shot from their houses if molested. But 
there was only shouting and groaning on the 
part of the mob, with an occasional breaking of 
windows ; the party attacked kept indoors, and 
I went home undisturbed. 

All these things looked like a coming storm. 
It was observable that men were beginning to 
use firearms more, about that time, even in 
New England. I find that in those days 1 read 
military books ; took notes on fortifications, 
strategy, and the principles of attack and de- 
fense. Yet all these preliminary events were 
detached and disconnected ; their disturbances 
were only like the little local whirlwinds that 
sometimes precede a tornado. There was a 
lull ; and then, on the day when Fort Sumter 
was fired upon, the storm burst and the whole 
community awaked. One of the first things 
thought of by all was the unprotected condition 



246 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

of Washington. It seemed to me that there 
was one simple measure to be undertaken for 
its defense, in case of danger ; so I went, on 
the very day when the news reached us, to 
several leading men in Worcester, who gave 
me a letter of recommendation to Governor An- 
drew, that I might ask him to appropriate a 
sum from his contingent fund, and to let me 
again summon Montgomery and his men from 
Kansas ; going with them into the mountains 
of Virginia, there to kindle a back fire of alarm 
and draw any rebel force away from Washing- 
ton. Governor Andrew approved the project, 
but had no contingent fund ; Dr. S. G. Howe 
entered warmly into it, and took me on State 
Street to raise money, as did Mr. S. G. Ward, 
afterwards, on Wall Street in New York. One 
or two thousand dollars were pledged, and I 
went to Harrisburg to see Governor Curtin, of 
Pennsylvania. He said that he would give a 
thousand dollars if John Brown could be brought 
back to life, and had my plan under considera- 
tion, when the rapid progress of events strength- 
ened the government enough to make any such 
irregular proceeding quite undesirable. 

Coming back to Worcester, I was offered 
the majorship of the Fourth Battalion of Infan- 
try, then hastily called into the United States 
service ; and when I declined this, the position 



CIVIL WAR 247 

was offered to my old schoolmate, Charles 
Devens, who, though almost wholly ignorant 
of military drill, accepted it on condition that 
our best local drill-master. Captain Goodhue, 
should go with him as adjutant. My reasons 
for not accepting were various : first, that I 
doubted my competency; secondly, that my 
wife, always an invalid, was just at that time 
especially dependent on me ; and lastly, that 
it was then wholly uncertain whether the gov- 
ernment would take the anti-slavery attitude, 
without which a military commission would 
have been for me intolerable, since I might 
have been ordered to deliver up fugitive slaves 
to their masters, — as had already happened to 
several officers. I have often thought what a 
difference it might have made in both Devens's 
life and mine if I had accepted this early oppor- 
tunity. I might have come out a major-general, 
as he did ; but I dare say that the government 
gained by the exchange a better soldier than it 
lost. Meanwhile I went on drilling and taking 
fencing lessons ; and a few months later, when 
the anti-slavery position of the government be- 
came clearer, I obtained authority from Governor 
Andrew to raise a regiment, and had about half 
the necessary ten companies provided for, in. 
different parts of the State, when one of the 
sudden stoppages of recruiting occurred, and 



248 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

the whole affair proved abortive. It was under- 
stood with Governor Andrew that while I was 
to raise the regiment, I was to be only second 
in command, the colonel being Captain Rufus 
Saxton, U. S. A., an officer with whom, by a 
curious coincidence, I was later to have the 
most intimate connection. I had been engaged 
upon this organization between October, 1861, 
and February, 1862, and the renewed disap- 
pointment was very hard to bear. In several 
of my printed essays, especially at the end of 
that called "A Letter to a Young Contributor," 
I find traces of this keen regret ; and when 
finally a new nine months' regiment, the Fifty- 
First Massachusetts, was called out, in August, 
my wife being in somewhat better health, I 
could keep out of the affair no longer, but 
opened a recruiting office in Worcester. Being 
already well known among the young men 
there, through the athletic clubs and drill clubs, 
I had little difficulty in getting much more than 
the required number, giving a strong nucleus 
for a second company, which was transferred 
to the command of my friend John S. Baldwin, 
now of the " Worcester Spy." 

It is almost impossible here to reproduce the 
emotions of that period of early war enlist- 
ments. As I ventured to say in the preface to 
" Harvard Memorial Biographies," "To call it a 



CIVIL WAR 249 

sense of novelty was nothing ; it was as if one 
had learned to swim in air, and were striking out 
for some new planet." All the methods, stand- 
ards, habits, and aims of ordinary life were re- 
versed, and the intrinsic and traditional charm 
of the soldier's life was mingled in my own case 
with the firm faith that the death-knell of sla- 
very itself was being sounded. Meanwhile, the 
arts of drill and the discipline were to be learned 
in practice, and the former proved incompara- 
bly easier than had been expected ; it turned 
out that there was no department of science in 
which the elements were so readily acquired. 
As to the exercise of authority, however, it 
was different. It was no longer possible to 
view a command only " in the light of a sug- 
gestion." Moreover, we were dealing with a 
democratic society, on which a new temporary 
aristocracy of military rank was to be built, 
superseding all previous distinction ; and the 
task was not light. Fortunately, I was older 
than many raw officers, — being thirty-eight, 
— and had some very young men in my com- 
pany, who had been confided to me by their 
parents as to a father. Within my own imme- 
diate command I had hardly a trace of trouble ; 
nor did I find the least difficulty in deferring 
to the general in command of the camp, who 
was by occupation a working mechanic, and 



250 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

uneducated except in war. But the trouble 
was that he was on duty only by day, returning 
to his home every night, during which period 
the regiment became a heterogeneous mass of 
men, as yet little trained either to command or 
to obey. Discipline was not easy, especially 
in the case of some newly arrived company, 
perhaps in a high state of whiskey ; and we 
had to learn to bear and forbear. I know that 
in the effort "to enforce order I fell rapidly out 
of popularity, usually for my merits ; and then 
inexplicably fell into it again, sometimes through 
acts of negligence. But nobody denied that my 
own company was at least in good condition, 
and from the moment we had a permanent 
colonel, and an admirable one, — afterwards 
General A. B. R. Sprague, since mayor of 
Worcester, — all went as it should. I was only 
a month with the regiment, but the experience 
was simply invaluable. Every man is placed 
at the greatest disadvantage in a higher mili- 
tary command, unless he has previously sown 
his wild oats, as it were, in a lower ; making his 
mistakes, suffering for them, and learning how 
to approach his duty rightly. 

There came into vogue about that time a 
" nonsense verse," so called, bearing upon my 
humble self, and vivacious enough to be widely 
quoted in the newspapers. It was composed, I 



CIVIL WAR 251 

believe, by Mrs. Sivret, of Boston, and ran as 
follows : — 

" There was a young curate of Worcester 
Who could have a command if he 'd choose ter, 

But he said each recruit 

Must be blacker than soot, 
Or else he 'd go preach where he used ter." 

As a matter of fact it came no nearer the truth 
than the famous definition of a crab by Cu- 
vier's pupil, since I had never been a curate, 
had already left the pulpit for literature before 
the war, and was so far from stipulating for a 
colored regiment that I had just been commis- 
sioned in a white one ; nevertheless the hit was 
palpable, and deserved its popularity. I had 
formed even in a short time a strong attach- 
ment to my own company, regiment, and regi- 
mental commander, — and one day, when the 
governor of Rhode Island had made his first 
abortive suggestion of a black regiment, I had 
notified my young lieutenants, John Goodell 
and Luther Bigelow, that such an enterprise 
would be the only thing likely to take me from 
them. A few days after, as we sat at dinner 
in the Worcester barracks, I opened a letter 
from Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton, military 
commander of the Department of the South, 
saying that he had at last received authority to 
recruit a regiment of freed slaves, and wished 
me to be its colonel. It was an offer that took 



252 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

my breath away, and fulfilled the dream of a 
lifetime. This was long before Massachusetts 
took steps in the same direction ; Kansas was, 
however, enlisting a regiment of free negroes, 
and three similar regiments, formed by the 
Confederates in Louisiana, had been turned 
into Union troops by General Butler ; but the 
first regiment of emancipated slaves as such 
had yet to be mustered in. There remained 
but one doubt : would it really be a regiment, 
or a mere plantation guard in uniform ? This 
doubt could be determined only on the spot ; 
so I got a furlough, went to South Carolina 
to inspect the situation, and saw promptly that 
General Saxton was in earnest, and that I could 
safely leave all and follow him. 

The whole condition of affairs at what was to 
be for me the seat of war was then most pecu- 
liar. General Saxton, who had been an Aboli- 
tionist even at West Point, was discharging the 
semi-civil function of military governor. Freed 
slaves by thousands, men, women, and children, 
had been collected on the Sea Islands of South 
Carolina, and were being rationed, employed, 
and taught under the direction of missionaries, 
agents, and teachers from the North ; these 
being sometimes admirable, but sometimes in- 
competent, tyrannical, or fanatical. Between 
these and the troops there existed a constant 



CIVIL WAR 253 

jealousy, and General Saxton, in a position 
requiring superhuman patience and tact, was 
obliged to mediate between the two parties. 
Major- General Hunter, at the head of the 
department, had been the very first to arm 
the blacks (in May, 1862), and had adhered, 
after his fashion, to that policy, — my regiment 
being a revival of that early experiment ; but 
some of his staff were bitterly opposed to any 
such enlistment, and thwarted him as soon as 
his back was turned, — a thing not difficult, as 
he was indolent, forgetful, changeable, and eas- 
ily accessible to flattery. While, therefore, my 
regiment had a nominal support, it was con- 
stantly hindered : there were difficulties as to 
uniforms, medicines, and guns ; it was often 
necessary to struggle to obtain more than a 
Cinderella's portion. This had the farther dis- 
advantage that it tempted us, perhaps, to be 
sometimes needlessly suspicious ; nor was our 
beloved General Saxton always free from over- 
sensitiveness. Incidentally, also, we found that 
in all connection with the regular army we 
must come in for our share of its internal 
feuds ; and we discovered that old West Point 
grudges were sometimes being wreaked on our 
unoffending heads. General Saxton's enemies 
occasionally striking at him through us. He, 
on the other hand, distrusted the intentions of 



254 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

certain officers in regard to us, feared lest we 
should be sacrificed under any orders but his, 
and sometimes held us back from service when 
he might better have risked us. All these 
drawbacks were trifles, however, beside the plea- 
sure of being fairly in military harness, and of 
bringing into the public service the warlike ma- 
terial which most persons regarded with doubt. 
There was also a happiness in dealing with 
an eminently trustful and affectionate race, 
and seeing the tonic effect of camp discipline 
upon the blacks. In this respect there was 
an obvious diiTerence between them and the 
whites. Few white soldiers enjoyed serving 
in the ranks, for itself ; they accepted it for 
the sake of their country, or because others did, 
or from the hope of promotion, but there was 
nevertheless a secret feeling in most minds that 
it was a step down ; no person of democratic 
rearing really enjoys being under the orders of 
those who have hitherto been his equals. The 
negroes, on the other hand, who had been or- 
dered about all their lives, felt it a step upward 
to be in uniform, to have rights as well as 
duties ; their ready imitativeness and love of 
rhythm made the drill and manual exercises 
easy for them ; and they rejoiced in the dignity 
of guard and outpost duty, which they did to 
perfection. It is, however, a great mistake to 



CIVIL WAR 255 

suppose that slavery, as such, was altogether 
a good preparation for military life ; and the 
officers who copied the methods of plantation 
overseers proved failures. It was necessary to 
keep constantly before the men that they were 
much more than slaves, to appeal to their pride 
as soldiers, to win their affection also, and then 
to exercise absolute justice ; and the officer 
who did all this could wind them round his 
finger. Through such influences it was needful 
to teach them, among other things, to obey the 
non-commissioned officers of their own color, 
and this they at first found hard. " I don't 
want him to play de white man ober me," was 
a frequent remark in such cases, and the ob- 
jection had to be patiently met by explaining 
that color had nothing to do with it ; that they 
obeyed their sergeants only as those sergeants 
obeyed their captains, or the captains yielded 
to me, or I took my orders from the general. 
In a little while this became perfectly clear to 
their minds, and they were proud, not offended, 
when sent on some expedition under a sergeant 
of their own race. This was made easier by 
the fact that we had among the non-commis- 
sioned officers much admirable material ; and 
the color-sergeant, Prince Rivers, was not only 
a man of distinguished appearance, but superior 
in the power of command to half of the white 



2S6 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

officers in the regiment. He had previously 
been the most conspicuous private coachman in 
Charleston ; there had been a reward of one 
thousand dollars offered for him when he es- 
caped from slavery ; and once, when visiting 
New York as General Hunter's orderly, he had 
been mobbed in the street for wearing the 
United States uniform, and had defended him- 
self successfully against half a dozen men, tak- 
ing his position in a doorway. After the war 
he was appointed a justice of the peace in 
South Carolina. 

It was a fortunate thing for both General 
Saxton and myself that each of us had been 
satisfied in advance of the essential courage of 
the blacks. In my case this was the result of 
a little experience, previously related, at the 
Burns riot, — when a negro stepped into the 
Court-House door before me ; in Saxton's case 
it came from his participation in the war be- 
tween the United States troops and the Florida 
Seminoles, when he had observed, having both 
blacks and Indians to fight against, that the 
negroes would often stand fire when the In- 
dians would run away. We were thus saved 
from all solicitude such as beset for a time the 
mind of that young hero, Colonel Robert Shaw, 
when he took the field, six months later, with 
his Massachusetts colored resriment. When I 



CIVIL WAR 257 

rode over to his camp to welcome him, on his 
first arrival, he said that while I had shown 
that negro troops were effective in bush-fight- 
ing, it had yet to be determined how they 
would fight in line of battle ; and I expressing 
no doubt on this point, he suggested that it 
would always be possible to put another line 
of soldiers behind a black regiment, so as to 
present equal danger in either direction. I was 
amazed, for I never should have dreamed of 
being tempted to such a step ; and he learned 
a lesson of more confidence when his men fol- 
lowed him upon the parapets of Fort Wagner, 
after a white regiment, in a previous assault, 
had lain down and refused to face the terrific 
fire from that almost impregnable fort. 

The colored soldiers caused me, and I think 
caused their officers generally, no disappoint- 
ment whatever in respect to courage or con- 
duct. As General Saxton wrote to a Northern 
committee of inquiry as to the freed blacks, 
they were " intensely human.'' They were cer- 
tainly more docile than white soldiers, more 
affectionate, and more impulsive; they prob- 
ably varied more under different officers and 
were less individually self-reliant, but were, on 
the other hand, under good guidance, more 
eager and impetuous than whites. They had 
also, in the case of my regiment, a valuable 



2S8 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

knowledge of the country. They were very 
gregarious, and liked to march together even 
on a fatigue party, singing as they marched, 
whereas white soldiers on such service were 
commonly to be seen tramping along singly. 
In regard to courage, there was not, I suspect, 
much difference. Most men have the ordinary 
share of that attribute ; comparatively few are 
adventurous ; the commander of any regiment, 
white or black, soon knew perfectly well just 
which of his men would be likely to volun- 
teer for a forlorn hope. Whether the better 
education and social position of white soldiers 
brought them more under the influence of what 
Sir Philip Sidney calls "the great appetites 
of honor " I cannot say ; this being, it will be 
remembered, Sidney's reason for expecting 
more courage from officers than from enlisted 
men. It is quite certain, on the other hand, 
that any want of such qualities was more than 
balanced by the fact that the black soldiers 
were fighting for their freedom and that of 
their families, this being the most potent of all 
motives. They used often to point out, in con- 
versation, that they had really far more at stake 
than their officers had, since, if the Confeder- 
ates conquered, or even if it were a drawn 
game, the negroes would all relapse into sla- 
very, while their white officers would go back 



CIVIL WAR 259 

to the North and Hve much as before. This 
soHcitude was at the foundation of all their 
enthusiasm ; and besides this there was their 
religious feeling, which was genuine and ardent, 
making them almost fatalists in action, and giv- 
ing their very amusements that half -pious, half- 
dramatic character which filled the camp every 
evening with those stirring songs that I was 
perhaps the first person to put in print, and 
that have reached so many hearts when sung 
by the Hampton singers and others. Riding 
towards the camp, just after dark, I could hear, 
when within a half-mile or thereabouts, the 
chorus of the song and the rhythmical clap- 
ping of hands ; and as I drew nearer, the gleam 
of the camp-fires on the dusky faces made the 
whole scene look more like an encampment of 
Bedouin Arabs than like anything on the At- 
lantic shores. 

Before I had joined the regiment, detach- 
ments of recruits had been sent down the coast 
of South Carolina and Georgia to destroy salt- 
works and bring away lumber ; and after it 
had grown to fuller size, there occurred several 
expeditions into the interior, under my com- 
mand, with or without naval escort. We went 
by ourselves up the St. Mary's River, where 
the men were for the first time actively under 
fire, and acquitted themselves well. The river 



26o CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

itself was regarded by naval officers as the most 
dangerous in that region, from its great rapid- 
ity, its sudden turns, and the opportunity of 
attack given by the projecting bluffs. To this 
day I have never understood why our return 
was not cut off by the enemy's felling trees, 
which could have been done easily at several 
points. We were on a " double-ender," — a 
steamer built for a ferry-boat, and afterwards 
protected by iron plates. There was often no 
way of passing a sharp curve, in descending, 
except by running one end ashore and letting 
the swift current swing the other extremity 
round, after which we steamed downwards, the 
engine being reversed, till the process was re- 
peated. At these points the enemy always 
mustered in numbers, and sometimes tried to 
board the vessel, besides pouring volleys on our 
men, who at such times were kept below, only 
shooting from the windows. The captain of 
my boat was shot and killed, and I shall never 
forget the strange sensation when I drew his 
lifeless form into the pilot-house which he had 
rashly quitted. It was the first dead body I 
had ever handled and carried in my arms, and 
the sudden change from full and vigorous life 
made an impression that no later experience 
surpassed. 

A more important enterprise was the recap- 



CIVIL WAR 261 

ture of Jacksonville, Florida, which had been 
held by the Union troops, and then deserted ; 
it was the only position that had been held on 
the mainland in the Department of the South, 
and was reoccupied (March, 1863) by two black 
regiments under my command, with the aid of 
a naval gunboat under Captain (afterwards Ad- 
miral) Charles Steedman, U. S. N. We took a 
large supply of uniforms, equipments, and extra 
rations, with orders, when once Jacksonville 
was secured, to hand it over to white troops 
that were to be sent under Colonel John D. 
Rust ; we meanwhile pressing on up the river 
to Magnolia, where there were large unoccu- 
pied buildings. These we were to employ as 
barracks, and as a basis for recruiting stations 
yet farther inland. It was of this expedition 
that President Lincoln wrote to General Hun- 
ter (April I, 1863): "I am glad to see the 
account of your colored force at Jacksonville. 
I see the enemy are driving at them fiercely, 
as is to be expected. It is important to the 
enemy that such a force shall not take shape 
and grow and thrive in the South, and in pre- 
cisely the same proportion it is important to us 
that it shall." Our part was faithfully carried 
through, and no disaster occurred, though I 
had to defend the town with a force so small 
that every resource had to be taxed to mislead 



262 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

the enemy into thinking us far more numerous 
than we were ; this so far succeeding that 
General Finnegan — afterwards the victor at 
Olustee — quadrupled our real numbers in his 
reports. We fortified the approaches to the 
town, drove back the enemy's outposts, and 
made reconnoissances into the interior ; and 
Colonel Rust with his white troops had actually 
appeared, when General Hunter, with one of 
his impulsive changes of purpose, altered his 
whole plan, and decided to abandon Jackson- 
ville. 

Once again, after the arrival of General Gill- 
more, we were sent up a Southern river. A 
night was chosen when the moon set late, so 
that we could reach our objective point a little 
before daybreak ; thus concealing our approach, 
and giving us the whole day to work in. It 
was needed on the South Edisto, for we found 
across a bend of the river a solid structure of 
palings which it took the period of a whole tide 
to remove, and which, had not my lieutenant- 
colonel (C. T. Trowbridge) been an engineer offi- 
cer, could not have been displaced at all. Even 
then only two out of our three small steamers 
could ascend the shallow stream ; and of these, 
one soon grounded in the mud, and the other 
was disabled by a shore battery. The expe- 
dition — which should never have been sent 



CIVIL WAR 263 

without more accurate local reconnoissances — 
failed of its nominal end, which was the de- 
struction of a railway bridge utterly beyond 
our reach. My own immediate object, which 
was recruiting, was accomplished, but at the 
final cost of health and subsequent military op- 
portunities. As I stood on the deck, while we 
were in action with a shore battery, I felt a 
sudden blow in the side, doubling me up as 
if a Sullivan or a Fitzsimmons had struck me. 
My clothes were not torn, but very soon a 
large purple spot, called " ecchymosis " by the 
surgeons, covered the whole side, and for weeks 
I was confined to bed. I had supposed it to 
have been produced by the wind of a ball, but 
the surgeons declared that there could be no 
ecchymosis without actual contact, and that I 
must have been grazed by a grapeshot or an 
exploded shell. This was to have found myself 
only half an inch from death, yet, in Mercutio's 
phrase, it was enough. I was long in hospital, 
my life being saved from the perils of perito- 
nitis, I was told, by the fact that I had never 
used whiskey. I came North on a furlough in 
1863 ; went back too soon, as men often did ; 
found the regiment subdivided and demoral- 
ized ; and having to overwork in bringing it 
into shape, with the effects of malaria added, I 
had ultimately to resign in the autumn of 1864, 



264 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

after two years' service, foregoing all hopes of 
further military experience. Up to this time I 
had stood the influence of a malarial climate 
better than most of my officers, and had re- 
ceived from the major, a somewhat frank and 
outspoken personage, the assurance that I was 
" tougher than a biled owl." 

During a part of my invalidism I was shel- 
tered — together with my surgeon, who was 
also ill — by my friend Mrs. Jean M. Lander, 
widow of the celebrated General Lander, and 
well known in earlier days on the dramatic 
stage; a woman much respected and beloved 
by all who knew her fine qualities. She had 
tried to establish hospitals, but had always been 
met by the somewhat whimsical opposition of 
Miss Dorothea L, Dix, the national superinten- 
dent of nurses, a lady who had something of 
the habitual despotism of the saints, and who 
had somewhat exasperated the soldiers by mak- 
ing anything like youth or good looks an abso- 
lute bar to hospital employment ; the soldiers 
naturally reasoning that it assisted recovery to 
have pleasant faces to look upon. One of Miss 
Dix's circulars read thus : " No woman under 
thirty years need apply to serve in government 
hospitals. All nurses are required to be very 
plain-looking women. Their dresses must be 
brown or black, with no bows, no curls or jew- 



CIVIL WAR 265 

elry, and no hoopskirts." Undaunted by this 
well-meant prohibition, Mrs. Lander, who was 
then a little more than thirty, but irreclaimably 
good looking, came down to Beaufort, South 
Carolina, accompanied by her mother, in the 
hope of establishing a hospital there, A sudden 
influx of wounded men gave General Saxton, 
erelong, the opportunity of granting her wish, 
and she entered with immense energy into her 
new task. She had on her hands some fifty 
invalid soldiers, and took for their use an empty 
building, which had yet to be fitted up, warmed, 
and properly furnished ; even the requisite beds 
were difficult to obtain. She would come in 
abruptly some morning and say to Dr. Rogers 
and myself, " Gentlemen, to-day I must remove 
every bedstead in this house to the hospital 
building. You have blankets ? " We could 
only meekly respond that we had blankets, and 
that the floor was wide. Twenty-four hours 
after, it would be, " Gentlemen, this day the 
cooking-stove goes ! Your servants can cook 
by the open fire .-* " Oh yes, our servants could 
easily manage that, we replied, and accepted 
the inadequate results. One day there came a 
rap at the old-fashioned door-knocker, and Mrs. 
Lander, passing swiftly through the hall, flung 
the portal open regally, as if it were in Macbeth's 
palace. We heard a slender voice explaining 



266 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

that the visitor was the Reverend Mr. So-and- 
So from New York, just arrived by steamer. 
" Mr. So-and-So ? " said our prima donna. " De- 
lighted to see you, sir ! Can you dress wounds .'' " 
— this in Siddons tones. The poor man started 
back, and said apologetically, " Spiritual wounds, 
madam ! " " No time for that, sir, now, — no 
time for that ; there are still thirty men in yon- 
der hospital with no beds to lie on ; we must 
secure the common comforts first." Timidly 
explaining that he had come from the North to 
Beaufort for his health, and that he had been 
recommended to her for "a comfortable lodg- 
ing," the pallid youth withdrew. It was no 
fault of his that he was forlorn and useless and 
decidedly in the way at an army station ; but I 
could not help wondering if, after his return, he 
would preach a sermon on the obvious defer- 
ence due to man as the military sex, and on the 
extreme uselessness of women in time of war. 

I have given few details as to my way of 
living in South Carolina and Florida, because 
much of it was described a few years after in 
a volume called " Army Life in a Black Regi- 
ment," which was translated into French by 
Madame de Gasparin in 1884. There was 
plenty that was picturesque about this experi- 
ence, and there were some things that were 
dangerous ; we all fought, for instance, with 



CIVIL WAR 267 

ropes around our necks, the Confederate author- 
ities having denied to officers of colored regi- 
ments the usual privileges, if taken prisoners, 
and having required them to be treated as fel- 
ons. Personally, I never believed that they 
would execute this threat, and so far as we 
were concerned they had no opportunity ; but 
the prospect of hanging was not a pleasant 
thing even if kept in the background, nor was 
it agreeable to our friends at home. In other 
respects my life in the army had been enjoy- 
able ; but it had been, after all, one mainly of 
outpost and guerrilla duty, and I had shared 
in none of the greater campaigns of the war. 
I had once received from an officer, then high 
in influence, what was equivalent to an offer 
of promotion, if I would only write a letter to 
Senator Sumner asking for it ; but this I had 
declined to do. As my promotion to a colonelcy 
had come unsought, so, I preferred, should any 
higher commission. For nominal rank I cared 
little, and I should have been unwilling to leave 
my regiment ; but I should have liked to see 
great battles and to fill out my experience 
through all the grades, if it had been possible. 
I came nearest to this larger experience in the 
case of the aimless but bloody engagement of 
Olustee, where I should have commanded a 
brigade had not my regiment been ordered 



268 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

back, even after being actually embarked for 
Florida. 

I never felt at all sure how far up in the 
service I might have climbed, even under the 
most favorable circumstances ; for that was al- 
ways a hard thing to predict of any one, in 
those days, even apart from the frequent oc- 
currences of favoritism and injustice, I saw 
around me men who had attained a much 
higher position than mine without a greater 
outfit, perhaps, of brains or energy ; but 
whether I could have shown that wide grasp, 
that ready military instinct, which belong to 
the natural leader of large forces, I can never 
know ; and I am afraid that I might always 
have been a little too careful of my men. Cer- 
tainly, I should have been absolutely incapable 
of that unsparing and almost merciless sac- 
rifice of them which made the reputation of 
some very eminent officers ; while for the 
mere discharge of ordinary duty I might have 
been as good as my neighbors. After all, it 
must be admitted that marked military talent 
is a special gift, and a man who has not had 
the opportunity can no more tell whether he 
would have displayed that faculty than a man 
who has never learned chess can tell whether 
he might or might not have developed into a 
champion player. For the final result, my 



CIVIL WAR 269 

sagacious elder brother felt content, he told 
me, that I should leave the army with the rank 
of colonel only. He said, with his accustomed 
keen philosophy, " A man may go through his 
later life quite respectably under the title of 
colonel, but that of general is too much for 
a civilian to bear up under, and I am glad you 
stopped short of it," For myself, I felt that 
to have commanded, with fair credit, the first 
slave-regiment in the Civil War was well worth 
one man's life or health ; and I lived to see 
nearly two hundred thousand (178,975) black 
soldiers marching in that column where the 
bayonets of the First South Carolina had once 
gleamed alone. 

When I left the service, two years of army 
life, with small access to books, had so far 
checked the desire for active literary pursuits, 
on my part, that I should actually have been 
content not to return to them. I should have 
liked better to do something that involved the 
charge and government of men, as for instance 
in the position of agent of a large mill or a 
railway enterprise. This mood of mind was 
really identical with that which led some vol- 
unteer officers to enter the regular army, and 
others to undertake cotton-raising at the South. 
In few cases did this impulse last long ; a regu- 
lar army career in time of peace usually proving 



270 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

unattractive, as did also the monotony of the 
plantation. In my own case this unsettled 
feeling soon passed away, and the old love of 
letters rapidly revived ; — the editing of the 
" Harvard Memorial Biographies " affording an 
easy transition, as was also the work of trans- 
lating the noble writings of Epictetus, of whom 
I could think with satisfaction that he was him- 
self a slave, and was the favorite author of Tous- 
saint L'Ouverture, the black military leader. 
Moreover, my wife had removed for health's 
sake to Newport, Rhode Island, and I found 
ready distraction in the new friendships and 
social life of that attractive place of residence. 
Of this portion of my life I have already given 
some glimpse in the novel called " Malbone " 
and in the collection of sketches called " Old- 
port Days," so that I will not dwell further 
upon it here. 



IX 

LITERARY LONDON TWENTY YEARS AGO 

No day in an American's recollection can 
easily be more cheerful than that in which he 
first found himself within reach of London, 
prepared, as Willis said half a century ago, to 
see whole shelves of his library walking about 
in coats and gowns. This event did not hap- 
pen to me for the first time until I was forty- 
eight years old, and had been immersed at 
home in an atmosphere of tolerably cultivated 
men and women ; but the charm of the new 
experience was none the less great, and I in- 
spected my little parcel of introductory letters 
as if each were a key to unlock a world un- 
known. Looking back, I cannot regret that I 
did not have this experience earlier in life. Val- 
entine, in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," 
says that homekeeping youth have ever homely 
wits ; yet it is something to have wits at all, 
and perhaps there is more chance of this if 
one is not transplanted too soon. Our young 
people are now apt to be sent too early to Eu- 
rope, and therefore do not approach it with their 



272 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

own individualities sufficiently matured ; but 
in those days foreign travel was much more of 
an enterprise than now, and no one could ac- 
cuse me, on my arrival, of being unreasonably 
young. 

I visited London in 1872, and again in 1878, 
and some recollections based on the letters 
and diaries of those two years will be combined 
in this chapter. The London atmosphere and 
dramatis per soncB changed little within the in- 
terval, but the whole period was separated by 
a distinct literary cycle from that on which 
Emerson looked back in 1843. He then wrote 
that Europe had already lost ground ; that it 
was not " as in the golden days when the same 
town would show the traveler the noble heads 
of Scott, of Mackintosh, Coleridge, Words- 
worth, Cuvier, and Humboldt." Yet I scarcely 
missed even these heads, nearly thirty years 
later than the time when he wrote, in the pro- 
spect of seeing Carlyle, Darwin, Tennyson, 
Browning, Tyndall, Huxley, Matthew Arnold, 
and Froude, with many minor yet interesting 
personalities. Since the day when I met these 
distinguished men another cycle has passed, 
and they have all disappeared. Of those whom 
I saw twenty-five years ago at the Athenaeum 
Club, there remain only Herbert Spencer and 
the delightful Irish poet Aubrey de Vere, — 



LITERARY LONDON 273 

and though the Club now holds on its lists 
the names of a newer generation, Besant and 
Hardy, Lang and Haggard, I cannot think that 
what has been added quite replaces what has 
been lost. Yet the younger generation itself 
may think otherwise ; and my task at present 
deals with the past alone. It has to do with 
the older London group, and I may write of 
this the more freely inasmuch as I did not 
write during the lifetime of the men described ; 
nor do I propose, even at this day, to report 
conversations with any persons now living. 

My first duty in England was, of course, to 
ascertain my proper position as an American, 
and to know what was thought of us. This 
was easier twenty-five years ago than it now is, 
since the English ignorance of Americans was 
then even greater than it is to-day, and was 
perhaps yet more frankly expressed. One of 
the first houses where I spent an evening was 
the very hospitable home of a distinguished 
scholar, then the president of the Philological 
Society, and the highest authority on the vari- 
ous dialects of the English language ; but I 
was led to think that his sweet and kindly wife 
had not fully profited by his learning. She 
said to me, " Is it not rather strange that you 
Americans, who seem such a friendly and cor- 
dial race, should invariably address a newcomer 



274 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

as ' stranger,' while we English, who are 
thought to be cold and distant, are more likely 
to say * my friend ' ? " She would scarcely 
credit it when I told her that I had hardly ever 
in my life been greeted by the word she 
thought so universal ; and then she added, " I 
have been told that Americans begin every 
sentence with * Well, stranger, I guess.' " I 
was compelled to plead guilty to the national 
use of two of these words, but still demurred 
as to the "stranger." Then she sought for 
more general information, and asked if it were 
really true, as she had been told, that railway 
trains in America were often stopped for the 
purpose of driving cattle off the track. I ad- 
mitted to her that in some regions of the far 
West, where cattle abounded and fencing ma- 
terial was scarce, this might still be done ; and 
I did not think it necessary to say that I had 
seen it done, in my youth, within twenty miles 
of Boston. But I explained that we Ameri- 
cans, being a very inventive race, had devised 
a little apparatus to be placed in front of the 
locomotive in order to turn aside all obstruc- 
tions ; and I told her that this excellent inven- 
tion was called a cow-catcher. She heard this 
with interest, and then her kindly face grew 
anxious, and she said hesitatingly, "But isn't it 
rather dangerous for the boy ?" I said wonder- 



LITERARY LONDON 275 

ingly, "What boy?" and she reiterated, "For 
the boy, don't you know, — the cow-catcher." 
Her motherly fancy had depicted an unfortu- 
nate youth balanced on the new contrivance, 
probably holding on with one arm, and dispers- 
ing dangerous herds with the other. 

One had also to meet, at that time, sharp 
questions as to one's origin, and sometimes 
unexpected sympathy when this was ascer- 
tained. A man of educated appearance was 
then often asked, — and indeed is still liable 
to be asked, — on his alluding to America, how 
much time he had spent there. This question 
was put to me, in 1878, by a very lively young 
maiden at the table of a clergyman who was 
my host at Reading ; she went on to inform 
me that I spoke English differently from any 
Americans she had ever seen, and she had 
known " heaps of them " in Florence. When 
I had told her that I spoke the language just 
as I had done for about half a century, and as 
my father and mother had spoken it before me, 
she caught at some other remark of mine, and 
asked with hearty surprise, "But you do not 
mean that you really like being an American, 
do you .'' " When I said that I should be very 
sorry not to be, she replied, " I can only say 
that I never thought of such a thing ; I sup- 
posed that you were all Americans because you 



276 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

could n't help it ; " and I assured her that we 
had this reason, also. She sung, later in the 
evening, with a dramatic power I never heard 
surpassed, Kingsley's thrilling ballad of " Lor- 
raine," of which the heroine is a jockey's wife, 
who is compelled by her husband to ride a 
steeple-chase, at which she meets her death. 
The young singer had set the ballad to music, 
and it was one of those coincidences stranger 
than any fiction that she herself was kUled by 
a runaway horse but a few months later. 

An American had also to accustom himself, 
in those days, to the surprise which might be 
expressed at his knowing the commonplaces 
of English history, and especially of English 
legend. On first crossing the border into Scot- 
land, I was asked suddenly by my only rail- 
way companion, a thin, keen man with high 
cheek-bones, who had hitherto kept silence, 
"Did ye ever hear of Yarrow.?" I felt in- 
clined to answer, like a young American girl 
of my acquaintance when asked by a young 
man if she liked flowers, " What a silly ques- 
tion ! " Restraining myself, I explained to him 
that every educated American was familiar with 
any name mentioned by Burns, by Scott, or 
in the "Border Minstrelsy." Set free by this, 
he showed me many things and places which I 
was glad to see, — passes by which the High- 



LITERARY LONDON 277 

land raiders came down, valleys where they 
hid the cattle they had lifted ; he showed me 
where their fastnesses were, and where " Tin- 
tock tap " was, on which a lassie might doubt- 
less still be wooed if she had siller enough. By 
degrees we came to literature in general, and 
my companion proved to be the late Princi- 
pal Shairp, professor of poetry at Oxford, and 
author of books well known in America. 

I encountered still another instance of the 
curious social enigma then afforded by the 
American in England, when I was asked, soon 
after my arrival, to breakfast with Mr. Froude, 
the historian. As I approached the house I 
saw a lady speaking to some children at the 
door, and she went in before I reached it. Be- 
ing admitted, I saw another lady glance at me 
from the region of the breakfast parlor, and 
was also dimly aware of a man who looked over 
the stairway. After I had been cordially re- 
ceived and was seated at the breakfast-table, it 
gradually came out that the first lady was Mrs. 
Froude's sister, the second was Mrs. Froude 
herself, while it was her husband who had 
looked over the stairs ; and I learned further- 
more that they had severally decided that, who- 
ever I was, I could not be the American gen- 
tleman who was expected at breakfast. Wha.t 
was their conception of an American, — what 



278 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

tomahawk and scalping-knife were looked for, 
what bearskin or bareskin, or whether it was 
that I had omitted the customary war-whoop, 
— this never was explained. Perhaps it was as 
in Irving' s case, who thought his kind recep- 
tion in England due to the fact that he used a 
goose-quill in his hand instead of sticking it in 
his hair, — a distinction which lost all its value, 
however, with the advent of steel pens. At 
any rate, my reception was as kind as possible, 
though my interest in Froude, being based 
wholly on his early book, " The Nemesis of 
Faith," was somewhat impaired by the fact 
that he treated that work as merely an indis- 
cretion of boyhood, and was more interested 
in himself as the author of a history, which, 
unluckily, I had not then read. We met better 
upon a common interest in Carlyle, a few days 
later, and he took me to see that eminent 
author, and to join the afternoon walk of the 
two in Hyde Park. Long ago, in the " At- 
lantic Monthly," I described this occasion, and 
dwelt on the peculiar quality of Carlyle' s laugh, 
which, whenever it burst out in its full volume, 
had the effect of dissolving all the clouds of his 
apparent cynicism and leaving clear sky behind. 
Whatever seeming ungraciousness had pre- 
ceded, his laugh revealed the genuine humorist 
at last, so that he almost seemed to have been 



LITERARY LONDON 279 

playing with himself in the fierce things he had 
said. When he laughed, he appeared instantly 
to follow Emerson's counsel and to write upon 
the lintels of his doorpost "Whim!" I was 
especially impressed with this peculiar quality 
during our walk in the park. 

Nothing could well be more curious than 
the look and costume of Carlyle. He had been 
living in London nearly forty years, yet he had 
the untamed aspect of one just arrived from 
Ecclefechan. He wore "an old experienced 
coat," such as Thoreau attributes to his Scotch 
fisherman, — one having that unreasonably high 
collar of other days, in which the head was 
sunk ; his hair was coarse and stood up at its 
own will ; his bushy whiskers were thrust into 
prominence by one of those stiff collars which 
the German students call "father-killers," from 
a tradition that the sharp points once pierced 
the jugular vein of a parent during an affection- 
ate embrace. In this guise, with a fur cap and 
a stout walking-stick, he accompanied Froude 
and myself on our walk. I observed that near 
his Chelsea home the passers-by regarded him 
with a sort of familiar interest, farther off with 
undisguised curiosity, and at Hyde Park, again, 
with a sort of recognition, as of an accustomed 
figure. At one point on our way some poor 
children were playing on a bit of rough ground 



28o CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

lately included in a park, and they timidly 
stopped their frolic as we drew near. The 
oldest boy, looking from one to another of us, 
selected Carlyle as the least formidable, and 
said, " I say, mister, may we roll on this here 
grass ? " Carlyle stopped, leaning on his staff, 
and said in his homeliest accents, "Yes, my 
little fellow, ye may r-r-roll at discraytion ; " 
upon which the children resumed their play, 
one little girl repeating his answer audibly, as 
if in a vain effort to take in the whole meaning 
of the long word. 

One of my pleasantest London dinners was 
at the ever hospitable house of the late Sir 
Frederick Pollock ; the other persons present 
being Lady Pollock, with her eldest son, the 
present wearer of the title, and two most agree- 
able men, — Mr. Venable, for many years the 
editor of the annual summary of events in 
the " London Times," and Mr. Newton, of the 
British Museum. The latter was an encyclo- 
paedia of art and antiquities, and Mr. Venable 
of all the social gossip of a century ; it was 
like talking with Horace Walpole. Of one sub- 
ject alone I knew more than they did, namely, 
Gilbert Stuart's pictures, one of which, called 
The Skater, had just been unearthed in Lon- 
don, and was much admired, " Why don't 
they inquire about the artist ? " said Sir Fred- 



LITERARY LONDON 281 

erick Pollock. " He might have done some- 
thing else." They would hardly believe that 
his pictures were well known in America, and 
that his daughter was still a conspicuous per- 
son in society. Much of the talk fell upon 
lawyers and clergymen. They told a story of 
Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, that he had actu- 
ally evaded payment of his tailor's bill on the 
ground that it had not been presented for six 
years, which in England is the legal limit. 
They vied with one another in tales of the 
eccentricities of English clergymen, — of one 
who was eighteen years incumbent of an im- 
portant parish, and lived in France all the time ; 
of another who did not conduct service in the 
afternoon, as that was the time when it was 
necessary for him to take his spaniels out; of 
another who practiced his hawks in the church ; 
of another who, being a layman, became master 
of Caius College (pronounced Keys) at Oxford, 
had a church living at his disposal, and pre- 
sented it to himself, taking orders for the pur- 
pose. After officiating for the first time he 
said to the sexton, " Do you know, that 's a 
very good service of your church?" He had 
literally never heard it before ! But all agreed 
that these tales were of the past, and that the 
tribe of traditional fox-hunting and horse-racing 
parsons was almost extinct. I can testify, 



282 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

however, to having actually encountered one of 
the latter class within a year. 

I met Matthew Arnold one day by appoint- 
ment at the Athenaeum, in 1878, and expressed 
some surprise that he had not been present at 
the meeting of the Association Litteraire In- 
ternationale which I had just attended in Paris. 
He said that he had declined because such 
things were always managed with a sole view 
to the glorification of France ; yet he admitted 
that France was the only nation which really 
held literature in honor, as was to be seen in 
its copyright laws, — England and America 
caring far less for it, he thought. He told me 
that his late address on "Equality" was well 
enough received by all the audience except the 
Duke of Northumberland, the presiding officer, 
and in general better by the higher class, which 
well knew that it was materialized, than by 
the middle class, which did not know that it 
was vulgarized. Lord William Russell, whom I 
found talking with him as I came up, had said 
to him, with amusement, " There was I sitting 
on the very front seat, during the lecture, in 
the character of the Wicked Lord." Arnold 
fully agreed with a remark which I quoted to 
him from Mrs. George Bancroft, who had been 
familiar with two courts, to the effect that 
there was far more sycophancy to rank among 



LITERARY LONDON 283 

literary men in London than in Berlin. She 
said that she had never known an English 
scholar who, if he had chanced to dine with a 
nobleman, would not speak of it to everybody, 
whereas no German savant would think of 
mentioning such a thing. " Very true," replied 
Arnold, " but the German would be less likely 
to be invited to the dinner." He thought that 
rank was far more exclusive and narrow in 
Germany, as seen in the fact that men of rank 
did not marry out of their circle, a thing which 
frequently took place in England. He also 
pointed out that the word mesalliance was not 
English, nor was there any word in our lan- 
guage to take its place. Arnold seemed to 
me, personally, as he had always seemed in lit- 
erature, a keen but by no means judicial critic, 
and in no proper sense a poet. That he is 
held to be such is due, in my judgment, only 
to the fact that he has represented the cur- 
rent attitude of mind in many cultivated per- 
sons. 

I visited Darwin twice in his own house at 
an interval of six years, once passing the night 
there. On both occasions I found him the 
same, but with health a little impaired after 
the interval, — always the same simple, noble, 
absolutely truthful soul. Without the fasci- 
nating and boyish eagerness of Agassiz, he was 



284 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

also utterly free from the vehement partisan- 
ship which this quality brings with it, and he 
showed a mind ever humble and open to new 
truth. Tall and flexible, with the overhanging 
brow and long features best seen in Mrs. Cam- 
eron's photograph, he either lay half reclined 
on the sofa or sat on high cushions, obliged 
continually to guard against the cruel digestive 
trouble which haunted his whole life. I remem- 
ber that at my first visit, in 1872, I was telling 
him of an address before the Philological So- 
ciety by Dr. Alexander J. Ellis, in which he had 
quoted from "Through the Looking - Glass " 
the description of what were called portman- 
teau words, into which various meanings were 
crammed. As I spoke, Mrs. Darwin glided qui- 
etly away, got the book, and looked up the 
passage. " Read it out, my dear," said her 
husband ; and as she read the amusing page, 
he laid his head back and laughed heartily. It 
was altogether delightful to see the man who 
had revolutionized the science of the world giv- 
ing himself wholly to the enjoyment of Alice 
and her pretty nonsense. Akin to this was 
his hearty enjoyment of Mark Twain, who had 
then hardly begun to be regarded as above the 
Josh Billings grade of humorist ; but Darwin 
was amazed that I had not read " The Jump- 
ing Frog," and said that he always kept it by 



LITERARY LONDON 285 

his bedside for midnight amusement. I recall 
with a different kind of pleasure the interest 
he took in my experience with the colored 
race, and the faith which he expressed in the 
negroes. This he afterward stated more fully 
in a letter to me, which may be found in his 
published memoirs. It is worth recording that 
even the incredulous Carlyle had asked eagerly 
about the colored soldiers, and had drawn the 
conclusion, of his own accord, that in their 
case the negroes should be enfranchised. " You 
could do no less," he said, "for the men who 
had stood by you." 

Darwin's house at Beckenham was ap- 
proached from Orpington station by a delight- 
ful drive through lanes, among whose tufted 
hedges I saw the rare spectacle of two Ameri- 
can elms, adding those waving and graceful 
lines which we their fellow countrymen are 
apt to miss in England. Within the grounds 
there were masses of American rhododendrons, 
which grow so rapidly in England, and these 
served as a background to flower-beds more 
gorgeous than our drier climate can usually 
show. 

At my second visit Darwin was full of in- 
terest in the Peabody Museum at Yale College, 
and quoted with approval what Huxley had 
told him, that there was more to be learned 



286 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

from that one collection than from all the 
museums of Europe. But for his chronic sea- 
sickness, he said, he would visit America to 
see it. He went to bed early that night, I 
remember, and the next morning I saw him, 
soon after seven, apparently returning from a 
walk through the grounds, — an odd figure, 
with white beard, and with a short cape wrapped 
round his shoulders, striding swiftly with his 
long legs. He said that he always went out 
before breakfast, — besides breakfasting at the 
very un-English hour of half-past seven, — and 
that he was also watching some little experi- 
ments. His son added reproachfully, "There 
it is : he pretends not to be at work, but he is 
always watching some of his httle experiments, 
as he calls them, and gets up in the night to 
see them." Nothing could be more delightful 
than the home relations of the Darwin family ; 
and the happy father once quoted to me a 
prediction made by some theological authority 
that his sons would show the terrible effects of 
such unrighteous training, and added proudly, 
looking round at them, " I do not think I have 
much reason to be ashamed." 

I think it was on this same day that I passed 
from Darwin to Browning, meeting the latter 
at the Athenaeum Club. It seemed strange to 
ask a page to find Mr. Browning for me, as if 



LITERARY LONDON 287 

it were the easiest thing imaginable; and it 
reminded me of the time when the Httle daugh- 
ter of a certain poetess quietly asked at the 
dinner-table, in my hearing, between two bites 
of an apple, "Mamma, did I ever see Mr. 
Shakespeare ? " The page spoke to a rather 
short and strongly built man who sat in a win- 
dow-seat, and who jumped up and grasped my 
hand so cordially that it might have suggested 
the remark of Madame Navarro (Mary Ander- 
son) about him, — made, however, at a later 
day, — that he did not appear like a poet, but 
rather "like one of our agreeable Southern 
gentlemen." He seemed a man of every day, 
or like the typical poet of his own " How It 
Strikes a Contemporary." In all this he was, 
as will be seen later, the very antipodes of Ten- 
nyson. He had a large head of German shape, 
broadening behind, with light and thin gray 
hair and whitish beard; he had blue eyes, 
and the most kindly heart. It seemed wholly 
appropriate that he should turn aside presently 
to consult Anthony Trollope about some poor 
author for whom they held funds. He ex- 
pressed pleasure at finding in me an early sub- 
scriber to his "Bells and Pomegranates," and 
told me how he published that series in the 
original cheap form in order to save his father's 
money, and that single numbers now sold for 



288 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

ten or fifteen pounds. He was amused at my 
wrath over some changes which he had made 
in later editions of those very poems, and readily 
admitted, on my suggesting it, that they were 
merely a concession to obtuse readers ; he pro- 
mised, indeed, to alter some of the verses back 
again, but — as is the wont of poets — failed to 
do so. I was especially struck with the way 
in which he spoke about his son, whose career 
as an artist had well begun, he said ; but it was 
an obstacle that people expected too much of 
him, as having had such a remarkable mother. 
It was told in the simplest way, as if there 
were nothing on the paternal side worth con- 
sidering. 

The most attractive literary headquarters in 
London, in those days, was, of course, the 
Athenaeum Club. It used to be said that no 
man could have any question to ask which he 
could not find somebody to answer the same 
afternoon between five and six o'clock, at that 
Club. The Savile Club and Cosmopolitan 
Club were also attractive. The most agreea- 
ble private receptions of poets and artists were 
then to be found, I think, at the house of 
William Rossetti, where one not merely had 
the associations and atmosphere of a brilliant 
family, — which had already lost, however, its 
most gifted member, — but also encountered 



LITERARY LONDON 289 

the younger set of writers, who were all pre- 
raphaelites in art, and who read Morris, Swin- 
burne, and for a time, at least, Whitman and 
even Joaquin Miller. There one met Mrs. Ros- 
setti, who was the daughter of Madox Brown, 
and herself an artist ; also Alma Tadema, just 
returned from his wedding journey to Italy 
with his beautiful wife. One found there men 
and women then coming forward into litera- 
ture, but now much better known, — Edmund 
Gosse, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Cayley, the 
translator of Dante, and Miss Robinson, now 
Madame Darmesteter. Sometimes I went to 
the receptions of our fellow countrywoman, 
Mrs. Moulton, then just beginning, but already 
promising the flattering success they have 
since attained. Once I dined with Professor 
Tyndall at the Royal Society, where I saw men 
whose names had long been familiar in the 
world of science, and found myself sitting next 
to a man of the most eccentric manners, who 
turned out to be Lord Lyttelton, well known to 
me by name as the Latin translator of Lord 
Houghton's poems. I amazed him, I remem- 
ber, by repeating the opening verses of one of 
his translations. 

I met Du Maurier once at a dinner party, 
before he had added literary to artistic suc- 
cesses. Some one had told me that he was 



290 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

probably the most bored man in London, din- 
ing out daily, and being tired to death of it. 
This I could easily believe when I glanced at 
him, after the ladies had retired, lounging back 
in his chair with his hands in his pockets, and 
looking as if the one favor he besought of 
everybody was to let him alone. This mute 
defiance was rather stimulating, and as he sat 
next to me I was moved to disregard the im- 
plied prohibition ; for after all, one does not go 
to a dinner party in order to achieve silence ; 
one can do that at home. I ventured, there- 
fore, to put to him the bold question how he 
could justify himself in representing the Eng- 
lish people as so much handsomer than they 
or any other modern race — as I considerately 
added — really are. This roused him, as was 
intended ; he took my remark very good-hu- 
moredly, and pleaded guilty at once, but said 
that he pursued this course because it was much 
pleasanter to draw beauty than ugliness, and, 
moreover, because it paid better. "There is 
Keene," said he, "who is one of the greatest 
artists now living, but people do not like his 
pictures so well as mine, because he paints 
people as they really are." I then asked him 
where he got the situations and mottoes for 
his charming pictures of children in the Lon- 
don parks. He had an especial group, about 



LITERARY LONDON 291 

that time, who were always walking with a 
great dog and making delightful childish ob- 
servations. He replied that his own children 
provided him with clever sayings for some time ; 
and now that they had grown too old to utter 
them, his friends kept him supplied from their 
nurseries. I told him that he might imitate a 
lady I once knew in America, who, when her 
children were invited to any neighboring house 
to play, used to send by the maid who accom- 
panied them a notebook and pencil, with the 
request that the lady of the house would jot 
down anything remarkable which they might 
say during the afternoon. He seemed amused 
at this ; and a month or two later, when I took 
up a new London " Punch " at Zermatt, I found 
my veritable tale worked up into a picture : a 
fat, pudgy little mother handing a notebook 
to a rather stately and defiant young govern- 
ess; while the children clustering round, and 
all looking just like the mother, suggested to 
the observer a doubt whether their combined 
intellects could furnish one line for the record. 
It was my scene, though with a distinct im- 
provement ; and this was my first and only 
appearance, even by deputy, in the pages of 
" Punch." 

It was in 1872, on my first visit to England, 
that I saw Tennyson. That visit was a very 



292 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

brief one, and it curiously happened that in the 
choice which often forces itself upon the hur- 
ried traveler, between meeting a great man 
and seeing an historic building, I was compelled 
to sacrifice Salisbury Cathedral to this poet, 
as I had previously given up York Minster 
for Darwin. Both sacrifices were made on 
the deliberate ground, which years have vindi- 
cated, that the building would probably last for 
my lifetime, while the man might not. I had 
brought no letter to Tennyson, and indeed my 
friend James T, Fields had volunteered a refusal 
of any, so strong was the impression that the 
poet disliked to be bored by Americans ; but 
when two ladies whom I had met in London, 
Lady Pollock and Miss Anne Thackeray, — 
afterwards Mrs. Ritchie, — had kindly offered 
to introduce me, and to write in advance that 
I was coming, it was not in human nature, at 
least in American nature, to decline. I spent 
the night at Cowes, and was driven eight miles 
from the hotel to Farringford by a very intel- 
ligent young groom who had never heard of 
the poet ; and when we reached the door of 
the house, the place before me seemed such a 
haven of peace and retirement that I actually 
shrank from disturbing those who dwelt therein. 
I even found myself recalling a tale of Tenny- 
son and his wife, who were sitting beneath a 



LITERARY LONDON 293 

tree and talking unreservedly, when they dis- 
covered, by a rustling in the boughs overhead, 
that two New York reporters had taken posi- 
tion in the branches and were putting down 
the conversation. Fortunately, I saw on the 
drawing-room table an open letter from one 
of the ladies just mentioned, announcing my 
approach, and it lay near a window, through 
which, as I had been told, the master of the 
house did not hesitate to climb, by way of es- 
cape from any unwelcome visitor. 

I therefore sent up my name. Presently I 
heard a rather heavy step in the adjoining 
room, and there stood in the doorway the 
most un-English looking man I had yet seen. 
He was tall and high-shouldered, careless in 
dress, and while he had a high and domed 
forehead, yet his brilliant eyes and tangled 
hair and beard gave him rather the air of a par- 
tially reformed Corsican bandit, or else an im- 
perfectly secularized Carmelite monk, than of 
a decorous and well-groomed Englishman. He 
greeted me shyly, gave me his hand, which 
was in those days a good deal for an English- 
man, and then sidled up to the mantelpiece, 
leaned on it, and said, with the air of a vexed 
schoolboy, " I am rather afraid of you Ameri- 
cans ; your countrymen do not treat me very 
well. There was Bayard Taylor " — and then 



294 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

he went into a long narration of some griev- 
ance incurred through an indiscreet letter of 
that well-known journalist. Strange to say, 
the effect of this curious attack was to put 
me perfectly at my ease. It was as if I had 
visited Shakespeare, and had found him in a 
pet because some one of my fellow countrymen 
had spelled his name wrong. I knew myself 
to be wholly innocent and to have no journal- 
istic designs, nor did I ever during Tennyson's 
lifetime describe the interview. He perhaps 
recognized my good intentions, and took me 
to his study, then to his garden, where the 
roses were advanced beyond any I had yet seen 
in England. I was struck, in his conversa- 
tion, with that accuracy of outdoor knowledge 
which one sees in his poems ; he pointed out, 
for instance, which ferns were American, and 
which had been attempted in this country, but 
had refused to grow. He talked freely about 
his own books, and it seemed to me that he 
must be like Wordsworth, as we find him in 
the descriptions of contemporaries, — a little 
too isolated in his daily life, and too much 
absorbed in the creations of his own fancy. 
Lord Houghton, his lifelong friend, said to me 
afterwards, "Tennyson likes unmixed flattery." 
This I should not venture to say, but I noticed 
that when he was speaking of other men, he 



LITERARY LONDON 295 

mentioned as an important trait in their char- 
acter whether they liked his poems or not, — 
Lowell, he evidently thought, did not. Perhaps 
this is a habit of all authors, and it was only 
that Tennyson spoke out, like a child, what 
others might have concealed. 

He soon offered, to my great delight, to 
take me to the house of Mrs. Cameron, the 
celebrated amateur photographer, who lived 
close by. We at once came upon Mr. Cameron 
— a very picturesque figure, having fine white 
hair and beard, and wearing a dressing-gown 
of pale blue with large black velvet buttons, 
and a heavy gold chain. I had heard it said 
that Mrs. Cameron selected her housemaids 
for their profiles, that she might use them 
for saints and madonnas in her photographic 
groups ; and it turned out that all these dam- 
sels were upstairs, watching round the sick- 
bed of the youngest, who was a great favorite 
in the Tennyson family. We were ushered 
into the chamber, where a beautiful child lay 
unconscious upon the bed, with weeping girls 
around ; and I shall never forget the scene 
when Tennyson bent over the pillow, with his 
sombre Italian look, and laid his hand on the 
unconscious forehead ; it was like a picture by 
Ribera or Zamacois. The child, as I after- 
wards heard, never recovered consciousness, 



296 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

and died within a few days. Presently Mrs. 
Cameron led us downstairs again, and opened 
chests of photographs for me to choose among. 
I chose one, The Two Angels at the Sep- 
ulchre, for which one of the maid servants 
had stood as a model ; another of Tennyson's 
Eleanore, for which Mrs. Stillman (Miss Spar- 
talis) had posed ; and three large photographs 
of Darwin, Carlyle, and Tennyson himself, — 
the last of these being one which he had chris- 
tened The Dirty Monk, and of which he wrote, 
at Mrs. Cameron's request, in my presence, 
a certificate that it was the best likeness ever 
taken of him. I have always felt glad to have 
seen Tennyson not merely in contact with a 
stranger like myself, but as he appeared among 
these friendly people, and under the influence 
of a real emotion of sympathy, showing the 
deeper nature of the man. 

No one knows better than myself how slight 
and fragmentary are the recollections here re- 
corded, yet even such glimpses occasionally 
suggest some aspect of character which formal 
biographers have missed. A clever woman 
once said to me that she did not know which 
really gave the more knowledge of a noted 
person, — to have read all he had written and 
watched all he had done, or, on the other hand, 



LITERARY LONDON 297 

to have taken one moment's glance at his face. 
As we grow older, we rely more and more on 
this first glance. I never felt for an instant 
that I had really encountered in England men 
of greater calibre than I had met before, — for 
was I not the fellow countryman of Emerson 
and Hawthorne, of Webster and Phillips ? — 
yet, after all, the ocean lends a glamour to the 
unseen world beyond it, and I was glad to have 
had a sight of that world, also. I was kindly 
dismissed from it, after my first brief visit, by a 
reception given me at the rooms of the Anglo- 
American Club, where Thomas Hughes — 
whom I had first known at Newport, Rhode 
Island — presided, and where Lord Houghton 
moved some too flattering resolutions, which 
were seconded by the present Sir Frederick 
Pollock. Returning to my American home, I 
read, after a few days, in the local newspaper 
(the " Newport Mercury "), that I was reported 
to have enjoyed myself greatly in England, and 
to have been kindly received, " especially among 
servants and rascals." An investigation by 
the indignant editor revealed the fact that the 
scrap had been copied from another news- 
paper ; and that a felicitous misprint had sub- 
stituted the offending words for the original 
designation of my English friends as " savants 
and radicals." 



X 

LITERARY PARIS TWENTY YEARS AGO 

I REACHED Paris, from London, on the morn- 
ing of May 30, 1878, arriving just in time for 
admission to the Theatre des Folies Drama- 
tiques, where the Voltaire centenary celebration 
was to be held that day, with Victor Hugo for 
the orator. As I drove up, the surrounding 
streets were full of people going toward the 
theatre ; while the other streets were so empty 
as to recall that fine passage in Landor's " Im- 
aginary Conversations " where Demosthenes 
describes the depopulation of all other spots 
in Athens except that where he is speaking to 
the people. The neighborhood of the theatre 
was placarded with announcements stating that 
every seat was sold ; and it was not until I had 
explained to a policeman that I was an Ameri- 
can who had crossed from London expressly 
for this celebration, that he left his post and 
hunted up a speculator from whom I could 
buy seats. They were twin seats, which I 
shared with a young Frenchman, who led me in 
through a crowd so great that the old women 



LITERARY PARIS 299 

who, in Parisian theatres, guide you to your 
place and take your umbrella, found their oc- 
cupation almost gone. 

It was my first experience of French public 
oratory ; and while I was aware of the resources 
of the language and the sympathetic power of 
the race, I was not prepared to see these so 
superbly conspicuous in public meetings. The 
ordinary appreciation of eloquence among the 
French seemed pitched in the key of our great- 
est enthusiasm, with the difference that their 
applause was given to the form as well as to 
the substance, and was given with the hands 
only, never with the feet. Even in its aspect 
the audience was the most noticeable I ever 
saw: the platform and the five galleries were 
filled almost wholly with men, and. these of 
singularly thoughtful and distinguished bear- 
ing, — an assembly certainly superior to Parlia- 
ment or Congress in its look of intellect. A 
very few were in the blouse of the ozivrier, and 
there was all over the house an amount of talk- 
ing that sounded like vehement quarreling, 
though it was merely good - natured chatter. 
There were only French people and French 
words around me, and though my immediate 
companion was from the provinces and knew 
nobody, yet there was on the other side a very 
handsome man, full of zeal and replete with 



300 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

information. When I asked him whether Vic- 
tor Hugo was yet upon the platform, he smiled, 
and said that I would not ask such a question 
if I knew the shout that would go up from the 
crowd when he came in. 

Applaud they certainly did when a white head 
was seen advancing through the throng upon 
the stage ; and the five galleries and the par- 
quet seemed to rock with excitement as he took 
his seat. I should have known Victor Hugo 
anywhere from the resemblance to his pictures, 
except that his hair and beard, cropped short, 
were not quite so rough and hirsute as they are 
often depicted. He bowed his strong leonine 
head to the audience, and then seated himself, 
the two other speakers sitting on either side of 
him ; while the bust of the smiling Voltaire with 
a wreath of laurel and flowers rose behind and 
above their heads. The bust was imposing, and 
the smile was kindly and genial, — a smile such 
as one seldom sees attributed to Voltaire. The 
first speaker, M. Spuller, was a fine-looking man, 
large, fair, and of rather English bearing ; he 
rested one hand on the table, and made the 
other hand do duty for two, and I might almost 
say for a dozen, after the manner of his race. 
Speaking without notes, he explained the plan of 
the celebration, and did it so well that sentence 
after sentence was received with " Bravo ! " 



LITERARY PARIS 301 

or "Admirable!" or " Oh-h-h ! " in a sort of 
profound literary enjoyment. 

These plaudits were greater still in case of 
the next speaker, M. Emile Deschanel, the author 
of a book on Aristophanes, and well known as 
a politician. He also was a large man of dis- 
tinguished bearing. In his speech he drew a 
parallel between the careers of Victor Hugo and 
Voltaire, but dwelt especially upon that of the 
latter. One of the most skillful portions of the 
address touched on that dangerous ground, Vol- 
taire's outrageous poem of "La Pucelle," founded 
on the career of Jeanne d'Arc. M. Deschanel 
claimed that Voltaire had at least set her be- 
fore the world as the saviour of France. He 
admitted that the book bore the marks of the 
period, that it was licencieux et coupable ; yet he 
retorted fiercely on the clerical party for their 
efforts to protest against Voltaire on this ac- 
count. When he said, at last, with a sudden 
flash of parting contempt, "Who was it that 
burned her } " (Qui est-ce qui I'a brulee .-') he 
dismissed the clergy and the subject with a 
wave of the hand that was like the flashing of 
the scimitar of Saladin. Then followed a per- 
fect tempest of applause, and Victor Hugo took 
the stage. 

His oration on Voltaire — since translated by 
Mr. James Parton — was delivered from notes, 



302 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

written in an immense hand on sheets twice as 
large as any foolscap paper I had ever seen ; 
and he read from these without glasses. He 
was at this time seventy-six, but looked ten 
years younger. He stood behind two great 
sconces, each holding six candles ; above these 
appeared his strong white-bearded face, and 
above him rose Voltaire and his laurel wreath. 
He used much gesture, and in impassioned mo- 
ments waved his arm above his head, the fingers 
apart and trembling with emotion. Sometimes 
he clapped one hand to his head as if to tear 
out some of his white hairs, though this hardly 
seemed, at the moment, melodramatic. His 
voice was vigorous, and yet from some defect of 
utterance, I lost more of what he said than in 
case of the other speakers. Others around me 
made the same complaint. His delivery, how- 
ever, was as characteristic as his literary style, 
and quite in keeping with it, being a series of 
brilliant detached points. It must be a stimulat- 
ing thing, indeed, to speak to a French audience, 
— to men who give sighs of delight over a fine 
phrase, and shouts of enthusiasrn over a great 
thought. The most striking part of Hugo's ad- 
dress, to my mind, was his defense of the smile 
of Voltaire, and his turning of the enthusiasm 
for the pending Exposition into an appeal for 
international peace. Never was there a more 



LITERARY PARIS 303 

powerful picture than his sketch of " that terrific 

International Exposition called a field of battle." 
After the address the meeting ended, — there 
was no music, which surprised me, — and every 
one on the platform rushed headlong at Victor 
Hugo. Never before had I quite comprehended 
the French effervescence as seen in the Chambre 
des Deputes ; but here it did not seem child- 
ish, — only natural ; as where Deschanel, during 
his own speech, had once turned and taken 
Victor Hugo's hand and clapped him caress- 
ingly on the shoulder. The crowd dispersed 
more easily than I expected ; for I had said to 
my French neighbor that there would be little 
chance for us in case of a fire, and he had 
shrugged his shoulders, looked up to heaven, 
and said, "Adieu ! " I went out through a side 
entrance, where Hugo was just before me : it 
was hardly possible to get him into his carriage ; 
the surrounding windows were crammed with 
people, and he drove away amid shouts. There 
was a larger and more popular demonstration 
that day at the Cirque Americain ; but the elo- 
quence was with us. To add to the general pic- 
turesqueness it was Ascension Day, and occa- 
sionally one met groups of little white-robed 
girls, who were still being trained, perhaps, to 
shudder at the very name of Voltaire, or even of 
Victor Hugo. 



304 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

I dined one day with M. Talandier, a member 
of the " Extreme Left " in the Chambre des 
Deputes, — a gentleman to whom my friend 
Conway had introduced me, they having become 
acquainted during our host's long exile in Eng- 
land. Louis Blanc, the historian, was present, 
with Mr. and Mrs. Conway and a few French- 
men who spoke no English ; and as there was 
also a pretty young girl who had been born in 
England of French parents, there was some con- 
fusion of tongues, though the Talandier family 
and Louis Blanc were at home in both lan- 
guages. I was delighted to meet this last- 
named man, whose career had been familiar to 
me since the revolution of 1848. He was very 
short, yet square in person, and not insignifi- 
cant ; his French was clear and unusually de- 
liberate, and I never missed a word, even when 
he was not addressing me. His small size and 
endless vivacity made him look like a French 
Tom Moore. He told many stories about the 
revolution, — one of an occasion where flags 
were to be presented by the provincial govern- 
ment to the regiments, and he was assigned to 
the very tallest colonel, a giant in size, who at 
once lifted Louis Blanc in his arms and hugged 
him to his breast. The narrator acted this 
all out inimitably, and told other stories, at one 
of which Carlyle had once laughed so that he 



LITERARY PARIS 305 

threw himself down and rolled on the floor, and 
Louis Blanc very nearly acted this out, also. 

He seemed wonderfully gentle and sweet for 
one who had lived through so much ; and con- 
firmed, without bitterness, the report I had 
heard that he had never fully believed in the 
National Workshops, which failed under his 
charge in 1848, but that they were put into his 
hands by a rival who wished them and him to 
fail. Everything at the meal was simple, as 
our hosts lived in honorable poverty after their 
exile. We sat at table for a while after din- 
ner, and then both sexes withdrew together. 
Through the open windows we heard the music 
from a students' dance-garden below, and could 
catch a glimpse of young girls, dressed mod- 
estly enough, and of their partners, dancing with 
that wonderful grace and agility which is pos- 
sible only to young Frenchmen, All spheres 
of French life intermingle so closely that there 
seemed nothing really incongruous in all this 
exuberant gayety beneath the windows, while 
the two veteran radicals — who had very likely 
taken their share in such amusements while 
young — were fighting over again their battles 
of reform. Both now have passed away. Louis 
Blanc's " Ten Years " still finds readers, and 
some may remember the political papers written 
a few years later by Talandier for the " Inter- 
national Review," published in Boston. 



306 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

By invitation of M. Talandier I spent a day 
(June 3) at Versailles, where the Chambre des 
Deputes was then sitting, and discovered in the 
anteroom, or salle d'attente, that, by a curious 
rule, foreigners were excluded until four p. m. ; 
yet the name of my host brought me in after a 
little delay. The hall was full of people wait- 
ing, each having to send his card to some mem- 
ber, naming on it the precise hour of arrival. 
The member usually appeared promptly, when 
an immense usher called in a stentorian voice 
for " la personne qui a fait demander M. Con- 
stant " — or whosoever it might be. Then the 
constituent — for such it commonly was — ad- 
vanced toward the smiling member, who never 
looked bored ; the mask of hospitality being 
probably the same, in this respect, through- 
out the legislative halls of the world. At last 
M. Talandier appeared, and found me a place 
among the Corps Diplomatique. The Cham- 
ber itself was more like the House of Repre- 
sentatives at Washington than like the House 
of Commons ; the members had little locked 
desks, and some were writing letters, like our 
Representatives, though I saw no newspapers. 
The ordinary amount of noise was like that in 
our Congress, though there was, happily, no 
clapping of hands for pages ; but when the 
members became especially excited, which in- 



LITERARY PARIS 307 

deed happened very often, it was like a cage 
of lions. For instance, I entered just as some- 
body had questioned the minister of war. Gen- 
eral Borel, about an alleged interference with 
elections ; and his defiant reply had enraged 
the "Lefts," or radicals, who constituted the 
majority of the assembly. They shouted and 
gesticulated, throwing up their hands and then 
slapping them on their knees very angrily, until 
the president rang his great bell, and they qui- 
eted down, lest he might put on his hat and 
adjourn the meeting. In each case the mem- 
ber speaking took his stand in the desk, or tri- 
bune, below the president ; and the speeches 
were sometimes read, sometimes given without 
notes. The war minister, a stout, red-faced man, 
— always, the radicals said, half intoxicated, — 
stood with folded arms, and looked ready for a 
coup d'etat ; yet I heard it said about me that 
he would be compelled either to retreat or to 
resign. One saw at a glance how much pro- 
founder political differences must be in France 
than with us, since in that cQuntry they avow- 
edly concern the very existence of the republic. 
I saw no women at the Chambre des Deputes, 
even as spectators, though they may have been 
concealed somewhere, as in the Ladies' Gallery 
of the House of Commons. An American was 
surprised, twenty years ago, with all the asso- 



3o8 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

ciations of the French revolutions in his mind, 
to see in Paris so much less exhibition of inter- 
est in public affairs, or indeed of general know- 
ledge, on the part of women than among men. 
For instance, on my going one day into a cri- 
merie in a distant part of Paris, and partaking 
of a bowl of bouillon botirgeois at twenty-five 
centimes (five cents), the woman in charge was 
interested to hear that I was from America, and 
asked if they spoke German there. Her hus- 
band laughed at her ignorance, and said that 
America was discovered by Christophe Colon ; 
going on to give a graphic and correct account 
of the early struggles of Columbus, of his voy- 
age and his discouragement, of the mutiny of 
his men, of his seeing the light on the shore, and 
so on. Then he talked about Spain, the Italian 
republic, and other matters, saying that he had 
read it all in the school-books of the children 
and in other books. It was delightful to find 
a plain Frenchman in a blouse who, although 
coarse and rough-looking, could talk so intelli- 
gently ; and his manners also had perfect cour- 
tesy. I could not but contrast him with the 
refined Italian youth who once asked a friend 
of mine in Florence what became of that young 
Genoese who sailed westward in 1492 to dis- 
cover a new continent, and whether he had 
ever been heard of again. 



LITERARY PARIS 309 

On another day I dined with Louis Blanc in 
bachelor quarters, with the Talandiers, Con- 
ways, and one or two others. He was less gay 
than before, yet talked much of the condition 
and prospect of affairs. France, he said, was 
not a real republic, but a nominal one ; having 
monarchical institutions and traditions, with a 
constitution well framed to make them per- 
petual. All the guests at his house seemed 
alike anxious for the future. The minister of 
war, whom I had heard virtually defying the 
people a few days before, was so well en- 
trenched in power, they said, as to be practi- 
cally beyond reach ; and though the republi- 
cans controlled the Chambre des Deputes, that 
was all, for the three other parties hated the 
republic more than one another. I asked Louis 
Blanc about Lamartine, whom he thought not 
a great man, and even injurious to the republic 
through his deference to the botirgeoisie. He 
described the famous speech in which Lamar- 
tine insisted on the tricolored flag instead of 
the red flag, and said it was quite wrong and 
ridiculous. The red flag did not mean blood 
at all, but order and unity, — it was the old 
oriflamme, the flag of Jeanne d'Arc. The tri- 
color had represented the three orders of the 
state, which were united into one by the revo- 
lution of 1848, so that the symbol was now 



3IO CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

meaningless ; and the demand for the red flag 
was resisted only by the bourgeoisie. The red 
flag, moreover, had always been the summons 
to order, — when it was raised a mob had notice 
to disperse (as on the reading of the riot act) ; 
and it was absurd in Lamartine to represent it 
to the contrary, — he knew better. The other 
gentlemen all agreed with this, and with the 
estimate of Lamartine. After dinner M. Talan- 
dier played for us on the piano the Marseillaise, 
which is always thrilling, and then the Carma- 
gnole, which is as formidable and dolorous as the 
guillotine itself. It was strange, in view of this 
beautiful city, constantly made more beautiful 
by opening new great avenues, some not yet 
finished, to recall these memories of all it had 
been through, and to see those who had been 
actors in its past scenes. 

On leaving home I had been appointed a dele- 
gate to the Prison Discipline Congress, to be 
held that year at Stockholm ; and though I 
never got so far, I attended several preliminary 
meetings of delegates in London and Paris, and 
was especially pleased, in the latter place, to 
see the high deference yielded by French ex- 
perts to our American leader, the late Dr. E. C. 
Wines, and also the familiar knowledge shown 
by these gentlemen in regard to American 
methods and experiments. Less satisfactory 



LITERARY PARIS 311 

was our national showing at another assem- 
blage, where we should have been represented 
by a far larger and abler body of delegates. 
This was the Association Litteraire Interna- 
tionale, which was appointed to assemble under 
the presidency of Victor Hugo, on June 11. I 
had gone to a few of the committee meetings at 
the rooms of the Societe des Gens de Lettres, 
and, after my wonted fashion, had made an 
effort to have women admitted to the Associa- 
tion Litteraire ; this attempt having especial 
reference to Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, who was 
then in Paris, and whose unusual command of 
the French language would have made her a 
much better delegate than most of the actual 
American representatives. In this effort I 
failed, although my judgment was afterwards 
vindicated when she gave great delight by a 
speeth in French at a women's convention, 
where I heard her introduced by the courteous 
and delicately articulating chairman as " Mees- 
ses Ouardow." 

As to the more literary gathering, the early 
meetings were as indeterminate and unsatisfy- 
ing as such things are wont to be, so that I was 
quite unprepared for the number and character 
of those who finally assembled. The main 
meeting was in some masonic hall, whose walls 
were covered with emblems and Hebrew in- 



312 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

scriptions ; and although the men were nearly 
all strangers to me, it was something to know 
that they represented the most cultivated liter- 
ary traditions of the world. When the roll was 
called, there proved to be eighty-five Frenchmen 
present, and only thirty-five from all other na- 
tions put together ; five of this minority being 
Americans. I was the only one of these who 
had ever published a book, I think. Mr. W. H. 
Bishop was another delegate, but his first 
novel, " Detmold," had not yet reached comple- 
tion in the " Atlantic ; " while the three remain- 
ing delegates were an Irishman, an Englishman, 
and an American, all correspondents of Amer- 
ican newspapers, the last of them being the 
late Edward King, since well known in liter- 
ature. It is proper to add that several den- 
tists, whose names had been duly entered as 
delegates, had not yet arrived ; and that at 
later sessions there appeared, as more substan- 
tial literary factors. President Andrew D. White 
and Mr. George W. Smalley. On that first 
day, however, the English delegation was only 
a little more weighty than ours, including Blan- 
chard Jerrold and Tom Taylor, with our own 
well-known fellow countryman " Hans Breit- 
mann " (Charles Godfrey Leland), who did not 
know that there was to be an American delega- 
tion, and was naturally claimed by the citizens 



LITERARY PARIS 313 

of both his homes. Edmond About presided, 
a cheery, middle-aged Frenchman, short and 
square, with broad head and grayish beard ; and 
I have often regretted that I took no Hst of the 
others of his nationality, since it would have 
doubtless included many who have since be- 
come known to fame. It is my impression that 
Adolphe Belot, Jules Claretie, and Hector Malot 
were there, and I am inclined to think that Max 
Nordau also was present. 

The discussions were in French, and there- 
fore of course animated ; but they turned at 
first on unimportant subjects, and the whole 
thing would have been rather a disappointment 
to me — since Victor Hugo's opening address 
was to be postponed — had it not been rumored 
about that Tourgueneff was a delegate to the 
convention. Wishing more to see him than to 
behold any living Frenchman, I begged the ever 
kind secretary, M. Zaccone, to introduce me to 
him after the adjournment. He led me to a 
man of magnificent bearing, who towered above 
all the Frenchmen, and was, on the whole, the 
noblest and most attractive literary man whom 
I have ever encountered. I can think of no 
better way to describe him than by saying that 
he united the fine benignant head of Longfellow 
with the figure of Thackeray ; not that Tour- 
gueneff was as tall as the English novelist, but 



314 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

he had as distinctly the effect of height, and 
afterwards, when he, Leland, and I stood to- 
gether, we were undoubtedly the tallest men 
in the room. But the especial characteristic 
of Tourgueneff was a winning sweetness of 
manner, which surpassed even Longfellow's, 
and impressed one as being " kind nature's," to 
adopt Tennyson's distinction, and not merely 
those " next to best " manners which the poet 
attributes to the great. 

Tourgueneff greeted us heartily as Amer- 
icans, — Mr. Bishop also forming one of the 
group, — and spoke warmly of those of our 
compatriots whom he had known, as Emma 
Lazarus and Professor Boyesen. He seemed 
much gratified when I told him that the types 
of reformers in his latest book, " Virgin Soil," 
— which may be read to more advantage in its 
French form as "Terres Vierges," — appeared 
to me universal, not local, and that I was con- 
stantly reminded by them of men and women 
whom I had known in America. This pleased 
him, he explained, because the book had been 
very ill received in Russia, in spite of its having 
told the truth, as later events showed. All 
this he said in English, which he continued to 
use with us, although he did not speak it with 
entire ease and correctness, and although we 
begged him to speak in French. Afterwards, 



LITERARY PARIS 315 

when he was named as one of the vice-presi- 
dents of the new association, the announcement 
was received with applause, which was renewed 
when he went upon the platform ; and it was 
noticeable that no other man was so honored. 
This showed his standing with French authors ; 
but later I sought in vain for his photograph in 
the shops, and his name proved wholly unfa- 
miliar. He was about to leave Paris, and I lost 
the opportunity of further acquaintance. Since 
then his fame has been temporarily obscured by 
the commanding figure of Tolstoi, but I fancy 
that it is now beginning to resume its prestige ; 
and certainly there is in his books a more wholly 
sympathetic quality than in Tolstoi's, with almost 
equal power. In his " Poems in Prose " — little 
known among us, I fear, in spite of the admir- 
able translation made by Mrs. Perry — there is 
something nearer to the peculiar Hawthorn- 
esque quality of imagination than in any other 
book I know. 

As to the Association Litteraire Interna- 
tionale, it had the usual provoking habit of 
French conventions, and met only at intervals 
of several days, — as if to give its delegates 
plenty of leisure to see Paris, — and I could 
attend no later meeting, although I was placed 
on the Executive Committee for America ; but 
it has since held regular annual conventions in 



3i6 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

different capitals, and has doubtless helped the 
general agitation for better copyright laws. 

I went again to the apartments of Louis Blanc 
on July 14, with a young American friend, to 
get tickets for the Rousseau centenary, which 
was also to be, after the convenient French 
habit of combination, a celebration of the cap- 
ture of the Bastille. Rousseau died July 2, 
1778, and the Bastille was taken on July 14, 
1789, so that neither date was strictly centen- 
nial, but nobody ever minds that in Paris ; and 
if it had been proposed that our Declaration of 
Independence or the Landing of the Pilgrims 
should also be included in the festival, there 
would have been no trouble in any mind on ac- 
count of the dates. Committee men were busy 
in Louis Blanc's little parlor, and this as noisily 
and eagerly as if the Bastille were again to be 
taken : they talked and gesticulated as only 
Latin races can ; in fact, the smallest commit- 
tee meeting in France is as full of excitement 
as a monster convention. It is a wonder that 
these people do not wear themselves out in 
youth ; and yet old Frenchmen have usually 
such an unabated fire in their eyes, set off by 
gray hair and often black eyebrows, that they 
make Anglo-Saxons of the same age look heavy 
and dull in comparison. French emotion does 
not exhaust itself, but accumulates strength in- 



LITERARY PARIS 317 

definitely, needing only a touch of flame, at any 
age, to go off like a rocket. 

Little Louis Blanc came in and went out, in a 
flowered dressing-gown ; and he really seemed, 
after his long English residence, to be an ele- 
ment of calmness in the eager crowd. We ob- 
tained tickets for the evening banquet (Bastille 
celebration) at three and a half francs each, and 
also received cards for the afternoon (Rousseau 
celebration) free and with reserved seats. To 
prepare the mind for both occasions, I attended 
a very exclusive and aristocratic mass at the 
Chapelle Expiatoire, and, later, went by omni- 
bus to the Cirque Americain, then existing in 
the Place du Chateau d'Eau. This was the 
place where the popular demonstration had 
been held on the Voltaire day ; but I had not 
seen that, and it was, in case of Rousseau, the 
scene of the only daylight celebration. Crowds 
of people were passing in, all seemingly French ; 
we did not hear a syllable of any other language. 
We were piloted to good seats, and found our- 
selves in the middle of enthusiastic groups, 
jumping up, sitting down, calling, beckoning, 
gesticulating, and talking aloud. There were 
soon more than six thousand persons in a hall 
which seated but four thousand, and the noise 
of this multitude was something to make one 
deaf. Every one seemed either looking for a 



3i8 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

friend or making signals to one. Most of those 
present were neatly dressed, even those who 
wore blue blouses and white caps ; and all was 
good nature, except that now and then some 
man would make himself obnoxious and be put 
out, usually under the charge of being a Bona- 
partist sent there purposely to make trouble. 
At such times there would be a sudden roar, 
a waving of arms and sticks, amid which one 
could discern a human figure being passed along 
rapidly from hand to hand, and at last dropped, 
gently but firmly, over the stairway ; his hat 
being considerately jammed down upon his 
head during the process. Yet all was done 
as good-naturedly as such a summary process 
permits ; there was nothing that looked like 
rioting. Opposite the high tribune, or speak- 
er's stand, was placed a bust of Rousseau, look- 
ing very white against a crimson velvet back- 
ground ; five French flags were above it, and 
wreaths of violets and immortelles below, with 
this inscription, " Consacra sa vie a la veritd." 
Beside this were panels inscribed with the chief 
events of Rousseau's life. 

When at last Louis Blanc came in with others 
— all towering above him — there was a great 
clapping of hands, and shouts of " Vive I'amnis- 
tie ! Vive la Republique ! Vive Louis Blanc ! " 
The demand for amnesty referred to the pardon 



LITERARY PARIS 319 

of political prisoners, and was then one of the 
chief war-cries of the radical party of France. 
After the group of speakers there appeared a 
larger group of singers, — there had been a 
band present even earlier, — and then all said 
" Sh ! sh ! sh ! " and there was absolute silence 
for the Marseillaise. Nothing of the kind in 
this world can be more impressive than the way 
in which an audience of six thousand French 
radicals receives that wonderful air. I ob- 
served that the group of young men who led 
the singing never once looked at the notes, and 
few even had any, so familiar was it to all. 
There was a perfect hush in that vast audience 
while the softer parts were sung, and no one 
joined even in the chorus at first, for everybody 
was listening. The instant, however, that the 
strain closed, the applause broke like a trop- 
ical storm, and the clapping of hands was like 
the taking flight of a thousand doves all over the 
vast arena. Behind those twinkling hands the 
light dresses of ladies and the blue blouses of 
workingmen seemed themselves to shimmer in 
the air ; there was no coarse noise of pounding 
on the floor or drumming on the seats, but there 
was a vast cry of " Bis ! Bis ! " sent up from 
the whole multitude, demanding a repetition. 
When this was given, several thousand voices 
joined in the chorus ; then the applause was 



320 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

redoubled, as if the hearers had gathered new 
sympathy from one another ; after which there 
was still one more great applauding gust, and 
then an absolute quiet as Louis Blanc arose. 

It all brought home to me that brief and 
thrilling passage in Erckmann-Chatrian's story 
of "Madame Th6rese," where a regiment of 
French soldiers, having formed square, is being 
crushed in by assaults on all sides, when the 
colonel, sitting on his horse in the middle, takes 
off his chapeau and elevates it on the point of 
his sword, and then begins in a steady voice 
to chant a song. Instantly a new life appears 
to run through those bleeding and despairing 
ranks ; one voice after another swells the chant, 
and the crushed sides of the square gradually 
straighten out under the strong inspiration, 
until it is all in shape again, and the regiment is 
saved. I could perfectly picture to myself that 
scene, while listening to this performance of 
the Marseillaise. Afterwards another air of the 
French Revolution was played by the band, the 
Chant du Depart, and this was received with 
almost equal ecstasy, and was indeed fine and 
stirring. There was also music of Rousseau 's 
own composition, the first I had ever heard, and 
unexpectedly good. This was finely sung by 
two vocalists from the Theatre Lyrique, and I 
was told that they were risking their appoint- 



LITERARY PARIS 321 

merits at that theatre by singing in an assembly 
so radical. 

The speaking was eloquent and impressive, 
being by Louis Blanc, M. Marcou, and M. 
Hamel. All read their speeches, yet each so 
gesticulated with the hand and accompanied 
the action with the whole movement of the 
body that it seemed less like reading than like 
conversation. The orators were not so distin- 
guished as at the Voltaire celebration, yet it 
was impossible to see and hear Louis Blanc 
without liking and trusting him, while he es- 
caped wholly from that air of posing which was 
almost inseparable from Victor Hugo, and was, 
perhaps, made inevitable by the pedestal on 
which France had placed him so long. The 
audience on this occasion was three times as 
large as at Hugo's address, but the attention 
was as close and the appreciation almost as 
delicate. It seems impossible to bring together 
a French audience that has not an artistic 
sense. The applause, like the speaking, had 
always a certain intellectual quality about it ; 
the things said might be extravagant or even 
truculent, yet they must be passed through the 
fine medium of the French tongue, and they 
were heard by French ears. Whenever there 
was the long swell of a sonorous sentence, the 
audience listened with hushed breath ; and if 



322 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

any one interrupted the cadence by premature 
applause, there came an almost angry " Sh ! 
sh ! " to postpone it. Once when this inter- 
ruption was persistently made, my next neigh- 
bor exclaimed with fury, " C'est tr-r-rop de 
precipitation ! " throwing himself forward and 
glaring at the unhappy marplot with an expres- 
sion suggestive of guillotines ; but when the 
interruption subsided and the sentence stood 
fulfilled, the reserved applause broke with ac- 
cumulated power, like a breaking wave. The 
enthusiasm of a French radical audience is as 
wonderful as the self-control of its stillness, or 
as the sudden burst of vivacity let loose during 
all the intervals between the speeches. The 
whole affair lasted from two o'clock until nearly 
six, and during the last hour or two of the time 
I found myself steadily losing that disentan- 
gling power which one must use in comprehend- 
ing the sentences of a foreign language ; the 
faculty became, as it were, benumbed in me, 
and the torrent of speech simply flowed by 
without reaching the brain ; it was much the 
same, I found, with my two young companions. 
Yet Louis Blanc was of all Frenchmen I had 
ever met the easiest to follow, — a thing the 
more remarkable as his brother, Charles Blanc, 
the well-known art critic, was one of the most 
difficult. 



LITERARY PARIS 323 

The evening banquet in memory of the de- 
struction of the Bastille was to take place at 
half past seven in a cafe in the Rue de Belle- 
ville, near the city barriers. As we went to- 
ward the place, we found ourselves in an abso- 
lutely French region. There was no more 
" English spoken " in the shop windows ; the 
people around us were natives or residents, not 
lookers-on ; there was an air of holiday ; and 
there were children not a few, including even 
babies tightly swathed. As we toiled up the 
long hill, we found ourselves approaching the 
very outskirts of Paris ; and when we entered 
the hall, there must have been five hundred 
persons already seated, among whom we were 
perhaps the only Anglo-Saxons. The men and 
women around us were about equal in num- 
ber, and were all neatly, sometimes fashionably 
dressed. Two men opposite us had an espe- 
cially cultivated look, and soon encouraged some 
conversation. At first they took us for Eng- 
lish, but were obviously pleased to hear that 
we were Americans, and then as visibly disap- 
pointed at learning, on inquiry, that neither of 
us belonged to the masonic order, with which 
European radicals claim a certain affinity. 
They drank their claret to the Republique 
Am^ricaine, but when I proposed the Repub- 
lique Fran^aise they shook their heads quite 



324 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

sadly, and pronounced that to be a widely dif- 
ferent thing. This, it must be remembered, 
was nearly twenty years ago, when the sense 
of uncertainty was far greater than it is now, 
and when the policy of the administration was 
thought very reactionary. 

There was a surprisingly good banquet for the 
money, — when it comes to cooking, Frenchmen 
of all parties make much the same demands, — 
but there were too few waiters and the courses 
came very slowly, so that when we left the hall, 
at ten o'clock, the guests had got no farther 
than chicken. Perhaps it was one result of 
this that the speaking took place as the dinner 
went on, instead of waiting for the cigars, as 
with us. I cannot recall the names of the ora- 
tors, except General Wimpffen, a man of vet- 
eran and soldierly appearance, who was received 
with great enthusiasm, the French army, since 
the Commune, being regarded as on the con- 
servative side. A peculiarly cordial greeting 
was given to a lady who read extracts from 
letters ; such a spectacle being then rare, I was 
told, at French public meetings. The speakers 
captured and destroyed the Bastille with great 
repetition and unanimously, and some of the 
talk was entirely without notes and quite elo- 
quent. At intervals the band would strike in 
with tremendous force, especially in the direc- 



LITERARY PARIS 325 

tion of the Marseillaise, the guests all joining 
in the chorus, with their mouths full and with 
a great thumping of knife-handles on the table. 
One of my young companions pointed out that 
the gleam of the blades during this last per- 
formance was the only thing which made a red 
republic seem a possibility. 

The nearest approach to a disturbance was 
provoked by a man who utterly refused to keep 
still during the speeches, and gave forth awful 
vociferations. At first all thought him a Bona- 
partist who had come in to make trouble, and 
they were going to put him out by main force. 
He succeeded, however, in explaining that he 
did not aim at a revolution, but at his dinner; 
the waiters having repeatedly passed him by, 
he said, so that he had had nothing to eat. 
Then all sympathy turned at once eagerly in 
his favor, for he had touched a national chord, 
and one appealing to radical and conservative 
alike, the world over ; so he was fed profusely 
at last, and all was peace. 



XI 

ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 

Living in a university city, I am occasionally 
asked by students how they can best train 
themselves for public speaking ; and I always 
begin with one bit of counsel, based on half 
a century's experience : " Enlist in a reform." 
Engage in something which you feel for the 
moment to be so unspeakably more important 
than yourself as wholly to dwarf you, and the 
rest will come. No matter what it is, — tariff 
or free trade, gold standard or silver, even com- 
munism or imperialism, — the result is the 
same as to oratory, if you are only sincere. 
Even the actor on the dramatic stage must fill 
himself with his part, or he is nothing, and the 
public speaker on the platform must be more 
than a dramatic actor to produce the highest 
effects. When the leading debater in an inter- 
collegiate competition told me, the other day, 
that he did not believe in the cause which he 
was assigned to advocate, my heart sank for 
him, and I dimly foresaw the defeat which 
came. There is an essential thing wanting to 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 327 

the eloquence of the men who act a part ; but 
given a profound sincerity, and there is some- 
thing wonderful in the way it overcomes the ob- 
stacles of a hoarse voice, a stammering tongue, 
or a feeble presence. 

On the anti-slavery platform, where I was 
reared, I cannot remember one really poor 
speaker ; as Emerson said, " eloquence was 
dog-cheap " there. The cause was too real, too 
vital, too immediately pressing upon heart and 
conscience, for the speaking to be otherwise 
than alive. It carried men away as with a 
flood. Fame is never wide or retentive enough 
to preserve the names of more than two or 
three leaders : Bright and Cobden in the anti- 
corn-law movement ; Clarkson and Wilberforce 
in that which carried West India Emancipa- 
tion ; Garrison, Phillips, and John Brown in 
the great American agitation. But there were 
constantly to be heard in anti-slavery meetings 
such minor speakers as Parker, Douglass, 
William Henry Channing, Burleigh, Foster, 
May, Remond, Pillsbury, Lucretia Mott, Abby 
Kelley, — each one holding the audience, each 
one making converts. How could eloquence 
not be present there, when we had not time to 
think of eloquence .-* — as Clarkson under simi- 
lar circumstances said that he had not time to 
think of the welfare of his soul. I know that 



328 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

my own teachers were the slave women who 
came shyly before the audience, women per- 
haps as white as my own sisters, — Ellen Craft 
was quite as white, — women who had been 
stripped and whipped and handled with insolent 
hands and sold to the highest bidder as un- 
hesitatingly as the little girl whom I had seen 
in the St. Louis slave-market ; or women who, 
having once escaped, had, like Harriet Tubman, 
gone back again and again into the land of 
bondage to bring away their kindred and friends. 
My teachers were men whom I saw first walk- 
ing clumsily across the platform, just arrived 
from the South, as if they still bore a hundred 
pounds weight of plantation soil on each ankle, 
and whom I saw develop in the course of years 
into the dignity of freedom. What were the 
tricks of oratory in the face of men and women 
like these.? We learned to speak because their 
presence made silence impossible. 

All this, however, I did not recognize at the 
time so clearly as I do now ; nor was I sure 
that I, at least, was accomplishing much for the 
cause I loved. In one respect the influence 
of Wendell Phillips did me harm for a time, as 
to speaking in public, because it was his firm 
belief that the two departments of literature 
and oratory were essentially distinct, and could 
not well be combined in the same person. He 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 329 

had made his choice, he said, and had aban- 
doned Hterature. It was hard to persuade him 
to write even a pamphlet or a circular, although 
when he did it was done with such terseness 
and vigor as to refute his theory. Of this I 
was gradually convinced, but there was a long 
period during which I accepted the alternative 
offered by him, and therefore reasoned that 
because literature was my apparent vocation, 
oratory was not. Of course it was often neces- 
sary for me to appear on the platform, but I 
did it at first only as a duty, and did not feel 
sure of myself in that sphere. Little by little 
the impression passed away, and I rejected 
Phillips's doctrine. Since the civil war, espe- 
cially, I have felt much more self-confidence 
in public speaking ; and it is one sign of this 
that I have scarcely ever used notes before an 
audience, and have long since reached the point 
where they would be a hindrance, not a help. 
Indeed, I believe that most young speakers 
can reach this point much earlier than they 
suppose ; and in my little book, " Hints on 
Writing and Speech-making," I have indicated 
how this can be done. A speaker's magnetic 
hold upon his audience is unquestionably im- 
paired by the sight of the smallest bit of paper 
in his hand. 

During a long intervening period, however, I 



330 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

lectured a great deal in what were then called 
"lyceum" courses, which stretched over the 
northern half of the United States, forty years 
ago, to an extent now hardly conceivable. 
There were two or three large organizations, 
or bureaus, which undertook systematically the 
task of bringing speaker and audience together, 
with the least possible inconvenience to both. 
One of these, whose centre was Dubuque, 
Iowa, negotiated in 1867 for thirty-five lectur- 
ers and one hundred and ten lecture courses; 
undertaking to distribute the one with perfect 
precision, and to supply the other. As a re- 
sult, the lecturer left home with a printed cir- 
cular in his pocket, assigning his dozen or his 
hundred engagements, as the case might be. 
Many of these might be in towns of which he 
had never heard the names. No matter ; he 
was sure that they would be there, posted a 
day's journey apart, and all ready to receive 
him. As a rule, he would meet in each new 
place what looked like the same audience, 
would make the same points in his lecture as 
before, would sleep at what seemed the same 
hotel, and breakfast on the same tough beef- 
steak. He would receive the usual compli- 
ments, if any, and make the same courteous 
reply to the accustomed questions as to the 
acoustics of the hall and the intelligence of the 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 331 

audience. In the far West he would perhaps 
reach villages where, as the people came twenty- 
miles for their entertainments, a dance might 
be combined with the lecture, — " tickets to 
Emerson and ball, one dollar." I have still a 
handbill, printed in some village in Indiana in 
1867, wherein Mr. J. Jackson offers to read 
"Hamlet" for twenty -five cents admission, 
ladies free. He adds that after the reading 
he will himself plan for the formation of a com- 
pany, with a small capital, for the manufacture 
of silk handkerchiefs of a quality superior to 
anything in the market, and will relate some 
incidents of his early life in connection with this 
particular article. Thus having administered 
Hamlet once, he would prepare his audience to 
shed the necessary tears on a second hearing. 

To the literary man, ordinarily kept at home 
by task work or by domestic cares, — and both 
of these existed in my own case, — there was a 
refreshing variety in a week or two, possibly a 
month or more, of these lecturing experiences. 
Considered as a regular vocation, such lectur- 
ing was benumbing to the mind as well as 
exhausting to the body, but it was at any rate 
an antidote for provincialism. It was a good 
thing to be entertained beyond the Mississippi, 
at a house which was little more than a log 
cabin, and to find, as I have found, Longfel- 



332 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

low's Dante on the table and Millais' Hugue- 
not Lovers on the wall ; or to visit, as I once 
visited, a village of forty houses, in the same 
region, in nineteen of which the "Atlantic 
Monthly " was regularly taken. After such 
experiences a man could go back to his writing 
or his editing with enlarged faith. He would 
get new impressions, too, of the dignity and 
value of the lecture system itself. In one of 
my trips, while on a small branch railway in 
New England, I found everybody talking about 
the prospective entertainment of that evening, 
— conductor, brakemen, and passengers all 
kept recurring to the subject ; everybody was 
going. As we drew near the end, the conduc- 
tor singled me out as the only stranger and the 
probable lecturer, and burst into eager explana- 
tion. "The president of the lyceum," he said, 
" is absent from the village, and the vice-presi- 
dent, who will present you to the audience, is 
the engineer of this very train." So it turned 
out : the engineer introduced me with dignity 
and propriety; he proved to be a reader of 
Emerson and Carlyle, and he gave me a ride 
homeward on his locomotive the next morning. 
There was something pleasant, also, in the 
knowledge that the lecturer himself met the 
people as man to man ; that he stood upon 
the platform to be judged and weighed. From 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 333 

the talk of his fellow travelers in the train, be- 
forehand, he could know what they expected of 
him ; and from the talk next morning, how he 
had stood the test. Wendell Phillips especially 
dreaded this last ordeal, and always went home 
after lecturing, if his home could by any possi- 
bility be reached that night, in order to avoid 
it. The lecturer, often unrecognized in his 
traveling garb, might look through the eyes of 
others on his own face and figure ; might hear 
his attitudes discussed, or his voice, or his opin- 
ions. Once, after giving a lecture on physical 
education, I heard it talked over between two 
respectable ladies, with especial reference to 
some disrespectful remarks of mine on the 
American pie. I had said, in a sentence which, 
though I had not really reduced it to writing, 
yet secured a greater circulation through the 
newspapers than any other sentence I shall 
ever write, that the average pie of the Amer- 
ican railway station was " something very white 
and indigestible at the top, very moist and indi- 
gestible at the bottom, and with untold horrors 
in the middle." I had given this lecture at 
Fall River, and was returning by way of the 
steamboat to Providence, when I heard one of 
my neighbors ask the other if she heard the 
lecture. 

"No," she answered, "I didn't. But Mis' 



334 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

Jones, she come home that night, and she 
flung her hood right down on the table, and 
says she, ' There,' says she, * Mr. Jones, I 'm 
never goin' to have another o' them mince pies 
in the house just as long as I live,' says she. 
'There was Sammy,' says she, 'he was sick all 
last night, and I do believe it was nothin' in all 
the world but just them mince pies,' says she." 

"Well," said the other lady, a slow, deliberate 
personage, " I do suppose that them kind of 
concomitants ain't good things." 

Here the conversation closed, but Mr. Weller 
did not feel more gratified when he heard the 
Bath footmen call a boiled leg of mutton a 
"swarry," and wondered what they would call 
a roast one, than I when my poor stock of 
phrases was reinforced by this unexpected poly- 
syllable. Instead of wasting so many words 
to describe an American railway pie, I should 
have described it, more tersely, as a " concom- 
itant." 

The lecture system was long since shaken to 
pieces in America by the multiplying of news- 
papers and the growth of musical and dra- 
matic opportunities. The "bureaus" now exist 
mainly for the benefit of foreign celebrities; 
and the American lecturer has come to concern 
himself more and more with questions of pub- 
lic policy and morals, while literature and sci- 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 335 

ence have receded more into the background. 
The transition was easy from the lyceum course 
to the poHtical platform, and this, at least, has 
held its own. No delusion is harder to drive 
out of the public mind than the impression that 
college -bred American men habitually avoid 
public duties. It may hold in a few large cities, 
but is rarely the case in country towns, and in 
New England generally is quite untrue. In 
looking back fifty years, I cannot put my finger 
on five years when I myself was not perform- 
ing some official service for the city or state, 
or both simultaneously. In each of the four 
places where I have resided I have been a 
member of some public school committee ; and 
in three of these places a trustee of the public 
library, there being then no such institution in 
the fourth town, although I was on a committee 
to prepare for one. 

As to service to the commonwealth, since my 
return to my native state — twenty years ago — 
I have spent thirteen years in some public 
function, one year as chief of the governor's 
personal staff, two years as member of the state 
House of Representatives, three years on the 
state Board of Education, and seven years as 
state military and naval historian. How well 
I did my duty is not the question ; we are deal- 
ing with quantity of service, not quality. Be- 



336 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

sides all this, I have almost invariably voted 
when there was any voting to be done, have 
repeatedly been a delegate to political con- 
ventions, and have usually attended what are 
called primary meetings, often presiding at them. 
There is nothing exceptional in all this ; it is 
a common thing for American citizens to have 
rendered as much service as is here stated, and 
in the university city where I dwell it is the 
rule, and not the exception, for professors and 
instructors to take their share in public duties. 
Some of those most faithful in this respect have 
been among the most typical and fastidious 
scholars, such as Professor Charles Eliot Norton 
and the late Professor Francis James Child. I 
confess that it makes me somewhat indignant 
to hear such men stigmatized as mere idealists 
and dilettantes by politicians who have never in 
all their lives done so much to purify and ele- 
vate politics as these men have been doing daily 
for many years. 

Side by side with this delusion there is an im- 
pression, equally mistaken, that college-bred men 
are disliked in politics, and have to encounter 
prejudice and distrust, simply by reason of edu- 
cation. They do indeed encounter this preju- 
dice, but it comes almost wholly from other edu- 
cated men who think that they can make a point 
against rivals by appealing to some such feeling. 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 337 

Nobody used this weapon more freely, for in- 
stance, than the late General B. F. Butler, who 
was himself a college graduate. He was always 
ready to deride Governor John D. Long for hav- 
ing translated Virgil ; while his audiences, if let 
alone, would have thought it a creditable per- 
formance. As a rule, it may be assumed that 
any jeer at a " scholar in politics " proceeds 
from some other scholar in politics. It was 
almost pathetic to me to see, while in the Mas- 
sachusetts legislature, the undue respect and 
expectation with which the more studious men 
in that body were habitually treated by other 
members, who perhaps knew far more than 
they about the matters of practical business 
with which legislatures are mainly occupied. It 
was, if analyzed, a tribute to a supposed breadth 
of mind which did not always exist, or to a com- 
mand of language which proved quite inade- 
quate. Many a college graduate stammers and 
repeats himself, while a man from the anvil or 
the country store says what he has to say and 
sits down. Again and again, during my service 
in the legislature, when some member had been 
sent there by his town, mainly to get one thing 
done, — a boundary changed or a local railway 
chartered, — he has come to me with an ur- 
gent request to make his speech for him ; and I 
have tried to convince him of the universal truth 



338 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

that a single-speech man who has never before 
opened his lips, but who understands his ques- 
tion through and through, will be to other mem- 
bers a welcome relief from a voice they hear 
too often. Wordsworth says : — 

" I 've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds 
With coldness still returning ; 
Alas ! the gratitude of men 

Hath oftener left me mourning." 

I have much oftener been saddened by the too 
great deference of men who were my superiors 
in everything but a diploma than I have been 
amazed by their jealousy or distrust. 

It is my firm conviction that there never was 
an honester body of men, on the whole, than 
the two Massachusetts legislatures with which 
I served in 1880 and 1881, If there has been 
a serious change since, which I do not believe, 
it has been a very rapid decline. Doubtless the 
legislature was extremely liable to prej udice and 
impatience ; it required tact to take it at the right 
moment, and also not to bore it. I had next me, 
for a whole winter, a politician of foreign birth, 
so restless that he never could remain half an 
hour in his seat, and who took such an aversion 
to one of the ablest lawyers in the house, because 
of his long and frequent speeches, that he made 
it a rule to go out whenever this orator began, 
and to vote against every motion he made. This 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 339 

was an individual case ; yet personal popularity 
certainly counted for a great deal, up to the 
moment when any man trespassed upon it and 
showed that his head was beginning to be 
turned ; from that moment his advantage was 
gone. Men attempting to bully the House usu- 
ally failed ; so did those who were too visibly 
wheedling and coaxing, or who struck an unfair 
blow at an opponent, or who aspersed the gen- 
eral integrity of the body they addressed, or 
who even talked down to it too much. On 
the other hand, there existed among the mem- 
bers certain vast and inscrutable undercurrents 
of prejudice ; as, for instance, those relating to 
the rights of towns, or the public school system, 
or the law of settlement, or perhaps only ques- 
tions of roads and navigable streams, or of the 
breadth of wheels or the close time of fishing, 
— points which could never be quite appreci- 
ated by academic minds or even city-bred minds, 
and which yet might at any moment create a 
current formidable to encounter, and usually 
impossible to resist. Every good debater in 
the House and every one of its recognized legal 
authorities might be on one side, and yet the 
smallest contest with one of these latent preju- 
dices would land them in a minority. 

There were men in the House who scarcely 
ever spoke, but who comprehended these pre- 



340 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

judices through and through; and when I had 
a pet measure to support, I felt more alarmed 
at seeing one of these men passing quietly 
about among the seats, or even conversing with 
a group in the cloak-room, than if I had found 
all the leaders in the legislature opposed to me. 
Votes were often carried against the leaders, 
but almost never against this deadly undertow 
of awakened prejudice. No money could pos- 
sibly have affected it ; and indeed the attempt 
to use money to control the legislature must 
then have been a very rare thing. There was 
not then, and perhaps is not to this day, any 
organized corporation which had such a control- 
ling influence in Massachusetts as have certain 
railways, according to rumor, in Connecticut and 
Pennsylvania. Something of this power has 
been attributed, since my time, perhaps with- 
out reason, to the great West End Railway ; 
but there was certainly only one man in the 
legislature, at the time I describe, who was 
generally believed to be the agent of a powerful 
corporation ; and although he was one of the 
most formidable debaters in the house, by rea- 
son of wit and brilliancy, he yet failed to carry 
votes through this general distrust. Men in 
such bodies often listen eagerly, for entertain- 
ment, to an orator who commands after all but 
few votes, while they are perhaps finally con- 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 341 

vinced, nevertheless, by some dull or stammer- 
ing speaker who thoroughly comprehends what 
he is discussing and whose sincerity is recog- 
nized by all. 

Perhaps the most tedious but often the most 
amusing part of legislative life consists in the 
hearings before committees. I was at differ- 
ent times House chairman of committees on 
constitutional amendments, on education, on 
woman suffrage, and on " expediting the busi- 
ness of the House." All these were liable to 
be the prey of what are called cranks, but espe- 
cially the first of these, which gathered what 
Emerson once called " the soul of the soldiery 
of dissent." There were men and women who 
haunted the State House simply to address the 
sessions of the Committee on Constitutional 
Amendments, and who would have been per- 
fectly ready to take all that part of the business 
off our hands. I find in my notebook that one 
of these, an Irishman, once said to us, with 
the headlong enthusiasm of his race, " Before I 
say anything on this subject, let me say a word 
or two ! In a question of integral calculus, 
you must depend on some one who can solve it. 
Now I have solved this question of Biennial Ses- 
sions," this being the subject under considera- 
tion, " and you must depend on me. Working 
men, as a rule, have what may be called a moral 



342 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

sense. Moral sense is that which enables us to 
tell heat from cold, to tell white from yellow : 
that is moral sense. Moral sense tells us right 
from wrong." Then followed an address with 
more of fact and reasoning than one could pos- 
sibly associate with such an introduction, but 
ending with the general conclusion, " It [the 
biennial method] would give more power to the 
legislature, for they would centralize more money 
into their pockets. I hope every member of the 
legislature, when this matter comes up, will be 
voted down." All these flowers of speech are 
taken from my own notebook as kept in the 
committee. 

I always rather enjoyed being contradicted 
in the legislature or being cross-examined on the 
witness-stand ; first, because the position gives 
one opportunity to bring in, by way of rejoinder, 
points which would not have fitted legitimately 
into one's main statement, thus approaching the 
matter by a flank movement, as it were ; and 
again because the sympathy of the audience is 
always with the party attacked, and nothing 
pleases the spectators better, especially in the 
court-room, then to have a witness turn the 
tables on the lawyer. It is much the same in 
legislative bodies, and nothing aided the late 
General Butler more than the ready wit with 
which he would baffle the whole weight of argu- 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 343 

ment by a retort. The same quality belonged 
to the best rough-and-ready fighter in the Mas- 
sachusetts legislature of 1881, — a man to whom 
I have already referred as lacking the confi- 
dence of the House. He was a man who often 
hurt the cause he advocated by the brutality 
of his own argument, and was never so formid- 
able as when he was driven into a corner, and 
suddenly, so to speak, threw a somerset over 
his assailant's head and came up smiling. I re- 
member to have been once the victim of this 
method when I felt safest. I was arguing 
against one of those bills which were constantly 
reappearing for the prohibition of oleomarga- 
rine, and which usually passed in the end, from 
a sheer desire to content the farmers. I was 
arguing — what I have always thought to this 
day — that good oleomargarine was far better 
than bad butter, and should not be prohibited ; 
and I fortified this by a story I had just heard 
of a gentleman in New York city, who had in- 
troduced the substitute without explanation at 
a lunch he had lately given, and who, on asking 
his guests to compare it with the best butter, 
also on the table, found them all selecting the 
oleomargarine. The House had seemed about 
equally divided, and I thought my little anecdote 

had carried the day, when Mr. arose and 

with the profoundest seriousness asked, " Will 



344 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

the gentleman kindly inform us at what precise 
stage of the lunch party this test was applied ? " 
The retort brought down the house instantly, 
and the rout which followed was overwhelming. 
It readily occurred to the experienced, or even 
to the inexperienced, that at a convivial party 
in New York there might arrive a period when 
the judgment of the guests would lose some of 
its value. 

I had, in the legislature, my fair share of suc- 
cesses and failures, having the pleasure, for 
instance, of reporting and carrying through the 
present law which guarantees children in pub- 
lic schools from being compelled to read from 
the Bible against the wish of their parents, and 
also the bill giving to the Normal Art School a 
dwelling-place of its own. I contributed largely, 
the reporters thought, to the defeat of a mea- 
sure which my constituents generally approved, 
the substitution of biennial sessions for annual ; 
and have lived to see it finally carried through 
the legislature, and overwhelmingly defeated by 
the popular vote. I supported many proposi- 
tions which required time to mature them and 
have since become laws ; as the abolition of the 
poll tax qualification for voting, and the final 
effacement of the school district system. Other 
such measures which I supported still require 
farther time for agitation, as woman suffrage 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 345 

and the removal of the stigma on atheist wit- 
nesses. The latter, as well as the former, was 
very near my heart, since I think it an outrage 
first to admit the evidence of atheists, and then 
admit evidence to show that they are such, — 
a contradiction which Professor Longfellow de- 
scribed as "allowing men to testify, and then 
telling the jury that their testimony was not 
worth having." This measure was defeated, 
not by the Roman Catholics in the House, but 
by the Protestants, the representatives of the 
former being equally divided ; a result attrib- 
uted mainly to my having a certain personal 
popularity among that class. A more curious 
result of the same thing was when the woman 
suffrage bill was defeated, and when four Irish- 
American members went out and sat in the 
lobby, — beside Mr. Plunkett, the armless ser- 
geant-at-arms, who told me the fact afterwards, 
— not wishing either to vote for the bill or to 
vote against what I desired. I rejoice to say 
that I had the same experience described by 
Theodore Roosevelt, in finding my general lik- 
ing for the Irish temperament confirmed by 
seeing men of that race in public bodies. Often 
unreasonable, impetuous, one-sided, or schem- 
ing, they produce certainly some men of a high 
type of character. There was no one in the 
legislature for whose motives and habits of mind 



346 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

I had more entire respect than for those of a 
young Irish-American lawyer, since dead, who 
sat in the next seat to mine during a whole 
session. I believe that the instinct of this 
whole class for politics is on the whole a sign of 
promise, although producing some temporary 
evils ; and that it is much more hopeful, for in- 
stance, than the comparative indifference to 
public affairs among our large French-Canadian 
population. 

The desire for oi^ce, once partially gratified, 
soon becomes very strong, and the pride of 
being known as a " vote-getter " is a very po- 
tent stimulus to Americans, and is very demor- 
alizing. Few men are willing to let the ofifices 
come to them, and although they respect this 
quality of abstinence in another, if combined 
with success, they do not have the same feel- 
ing for it per se. They early glide into the 
habit of regarding ofhce as a perquisite, and as 
something to be given to the man who works 
hardest for it, not to the man who is best fitted 
for it. Money too necessarily enters into the 
account, as is shown by the habit of assessing 
candidates in proportion to their salaries — a 
thing to which I have always refused to sub- 
mit. Again, I am sorry to say, there is a cer- 
tain amount of hypocrisy on the subject, and 
men often carry on a still hunt, as it is tech- 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 347 

nically called, and do not frankly own their 
methods. I remember when, some thirty years 
ago, a man eminent in our public life was boast- 
ing to me of the nomination of his younger 
brother for Congress, and this especially on 
the ground that whereas his competitor for the 
nomination had gone about promising offices 
and other rewards to his henchmen, the suc- 
cessful candidate had entirely refused to do 
anything of the kind, and had won on his 
merits alone. Afterward, on my asking the 
manager of the latter's campaign whether there 
was really so much difference in the methods 
of the two, he said with a chuckle, " Well, I 
guess there was n't much left undone on either 
side." The whole tendency of public life is 
undoubtedly to make a man an incipient boss, 
and to tempt him to scheme and bargain ; and 
it is only the most favorable circumstances 
which can enable a man to succeed without 
this ; it is mainly a question whether he shall 
do it in person, or through an agent or "wicked 
partner." The knowledge of this drives from 
public life some men well fitted to adorn it, and 
brings in many who are unfit. The only ques- 
tion is whether there is much variation in this re- 
spect between different countries, and whether 
the process by which a man gets promotion in 
England, for instance, differs always essentially 



348 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

from the method by which position is gained in 
American public life. It is my own impression 
that this is also a case where there is not much' 
left undone on either side. 

Here is one plain advantage in the hands of 
the literary man : that he lives mainly in a 
world where these various devices are far less 
needful. The artist, said Goethe, is the only 
man who lives with unconcealed aims. Suc- 
cesses are often won by inferior productions, 
no doubt, but it is because these are in some 
way better fitted to the current taste, and it is 
very rarely intrigue or pushing which secures 
fame. It is rare to see a book which suc- 
ceeds mainly through business strategy ; and if 
such a case occurs, it is very apt to be only a 
temporary affair, followed by reaction. This, 
therefore, is an advantage on the side of litera- 
ture ; but, on the other hand, the direct contact 
with men and the sense of being uncloistered 
is always a source of enjoyment in public life, 
and I should be sorry to go altogether without 
it. Presiding at public meetings, for instance, 
is a position which affords positive enjoyment 
to any one to whom it comes easily ; it demands 
chiefly a clear head, prompt decision, absolute 
impartiality, and tolerable tact. An audience 
which recognizes these qualities will almost in- 
variably sustain the chairman ; those present 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 349 

have usually come there for a certain purpose, 
to carry the meeting fairly through, and they 
will stand by a man who helps to this, though 
if he is tricky they will rebel, and if he is 
irresolute they will ride over him. The rules 
of order are really very simple, and are almost 
always based on good common sense ; and 
there is the same sort of pleasure in managing 
a somewhat turbulent meeting that is found in 
driving a four-in-hand. At smaller meetings of 
committees and the like, an enormous amount 
can be done by conciliation ; nine times out of 
ten the differences are essentially verbal, and 
the suggestion of a word, the substitution of a 
syllable, will perhaps quell the rising storm. 
People are sometimes much less divided in 
purpose than they suppose themselves to be, 
and an extremely small concession will furnish 
a sufficient relief for pride. There is much, 
also, in watching the temper of those with 
whom you deal and in choosing the fortunate 
moment, — a thing which the late President 
Garfield, while leader of the House of Repre- 
sentatives at Washington, pointed out to me 
as the first essential of success. There were 
days, he said, when one could carry through, 
almost without opposition, measures that at 
other times would have to be fought inch by 
inch ; and I afterwards noticed the same thing 



3SO CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

in the Massachusetts legislature. It is so, 
also, I have heard the attendants say, even 
with the wild beasts in a menagerie : there are 
occasions when the storm signals are raised, 
and no risks must be taken, even with the 
tamest. 

Probably no other presidential election which 
ever took place in this country showed so small 
a share of what is base or selfish in politics as 
the first election of President Cleveland ; and 
in this I happened to take a pretty active part. 
I was concerned in his original nomination and 
afterwards spoke in his behalf in five different 
states, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ver- 
mont, New York, and New Jersey, and was 
brought closely in contact with the current of 
popular feeling, which I found a sound and 
wholesome one. The fact that he was a new 
man kept him singularly free from personal 
entanglements until actually in office ; and his 
rather deliberate and stubborn temperament, 
with the tone of his leading supporters, gave 
an added safeguard. On the other hand,, the 
same slowness of temperament made it impossi- 
ble for him to supervise all departments at once, 
and he had to leave some of them in the hands 
of old-fashioned spoilsmen. There was among 
those who originally brought him forward — 
the so-called Mugwumps — an almost exag- 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 351 

gerated unselfishness, at least for a time; in 
Massachusetts, especially, it was practically un- 
derstood among them that they were to ask 
for nothing personally ; and they generally got 
what they asked for. Mr. Cleveland's admin- 
istration, with all its strength and weakness, 
has gone into history; he had, if ever a man 
had, les d^fmits de ses qualitis, but I cannot 
remember any President whose support im- 
plied so little that was personally unsatisfac- 
tory. This I say although I was led by my in- 
terest in him to accept, rather against my will, 
a nomination for Congress on the Democratic 
ticket at the time when Mr. Cleveland failed 
of reelection (1888). I made many speeches 
in my own district, mainly in his behalf ; and 
although I was defeated, I had what is regarded 
in politics as the creditable outcome of having 
more votes in the district than the head of the 
ticket. 

There are always many curious experiences in 
campaign-speaking. It will sometimes happen 
that the orators who are to meet on the plat- 
form have approached the matter from wholly 
different points of view, so that each makes 
concessions which logically destroy the other's 
arguments, were the audience only quick 
enough to find it out ; or it may happen — 
which is worse — that the first speaker antici- 



352 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

pates the second so completely as to leave him 
little to say. It is universally the case, I be- 
lieve, that toward the end of the campaign 
every good point made by any speaker, every 
telling anecdote, every neat repartee, is so 
quoted from one to another that the speeches 
grow more and more identical. One gets ac- 
quainted, too, with a variety of prejudices, and 
gains insight into many local peculiarities and 
even accents. I remember that once, when I 
was speaking on the same platform with an 
able young Irish lawyer, he was making an 
attack on the present Senator Lodge, and said 
contemptuously, " Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge of 
Nahant" — and he paused for a response which 
did not adequately follow. Then he repeated 
more emphatically, " Of Nahant ! He calls it 
in that way, but common people say Nahant ! " 
Then the audience took the point, and, being 
largely Irish, responded enthusiastically. Now, 
Mr. Lodge had only pronounced the name of 
his place of residence as he had done from 
the cradle, as his parents had said it before 
him, and as all good Bostonians had habitually 
pronounced it, with the broad sound that is 
universal among Englishmen, except — as Mr. 
Thomas Hardy has lately assured me — in the 
Wessex region ; while this sarcastic young 
political critic, on the other hand, representing 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 353 

the Western and Southern and Irish mode of 
speech, treated this tradition of boyhood as a 
mere bit of affectation. 

One forms unexpected judgments of charac- 
ters, also, on the platform. I can remember 
one well-known lawyer, — not now living, — 
with whom I was at several times associated, 
and whose manner to an audience, as to a 
jury, was so intolerably coaxing, flattering, and 
wheedling that it always left me with a strong 
wish that I could conscientiously vote against 
him. I remember also one eminent clergyman 
and popular orator who spoke with me before 
a very rough audience at Jersey City, and who 
so lowered himself by his tone on the platform, 
making allusions and repartees so coarse, that 
I hoped I might never have to speak beside 
him again. Of all the speakers with whom I 
have ever occupied the platform, the one with 
whom I found it pleasantest to be associated 
was the late Governor William Eustis Russell 
of Massachusetts. Carrying his election three 
successive times in a state where his party was 
distinctly in the minority, he yet had, among 
all political speakers whom I have ever heard, 
the greatest simplicity and directness of state- 
ment, the most entire absence of trick, of clap- 
trap, or of anything which would have low- 
ered him. Striking directly at the main line of 



354 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

his argument, always well fortified, making his 
points uniformly clear, dealing sparingly in joke 
or anecdote, yet never failing to hold his audi- 
ence, he was very near the ideal of a political 
speaker ; nor has the death of any man in pub- 
lic life appeared so peculiar and irremediable 
a loss. 

On the election of John Davis Long, now 
Secretary of the Navy, as governor of Massa- 
chusetts in 1880, he asked me to act on his 
military staff ; and although I had not known 
him personally, I felt bound to accept the post. 
The position is commonly regarded in time of 
peace as merely ornamental, but I had learned 
during the civil war how important it might 
become at any moment ; and as nearly all his 
staff had seen some actual service, I regarded 
the appointment as an honor. So peaceful 
was his administration that my chief duty was 
in representing him at public dinners and mak- 
ing speeches in his place. Sometimes, how- 
ever, I went with him, and could admire in 
him that wondrous gift, which is called in other 
countries " the royal faculty," of always remem- 
bering the name of every one. With the ut- 
most good will toward the human race, I never 
could attain to this gift of vivid personal recol- 
lection, and could only admire in my chief the 
unerring precision with which he knew in each 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 355 

case whether it was his constituent's wife or 
grandaunt who had been suffering under chronic 
rheumatism last year, and who must now be 
asked for with accuracy. He had, too, the 
greatest tact in dealing with his audiences, not 
merely through humor and genial good sense, 
but even to the point of risking all upon some 
little stroke of audacity. This happened, for 
instance, when he delighted the Ancient and 
Honorable Artillery, a body made up from vari- 
ous military and non- military ingredients, by 
complimenting them on their style of marching, 
— which was rarely complimented by others, — 
and this on the ground that he did "not re- 
member ever to have seen just such march- 
ing." The shot told, and was received with 
cheer upon cheer. Almost the only mistake I 
ever knew this deservedly popular official to 
make in dealing with an audience was when he 
repeated the same stroke soon after upon a 
rural semi-military company of somewhat sim- 
ilar description, which received it in stern and 
unsympathetic silence ; for it was their march- 
ing upon which these excellent citizens had, 
perhaps mistakenly, prided themselves the most. 
The Nemesis of public speaking — the thing 
which makes it seem almost worthless in the 
long run — is the impossibility of making it 
tell for anything after its moment is past. 



356 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

A book remains always in existence, — litera 
saipta manet, — and long after it seems for- 
gotten it may be disinterred from the dust of 
libraries, and be judged as freshly as if written 
yesterday. The popular orator soon disappears 
from memory, and there is perhaps substituted 
in his place some solid thinker like Burke, who 
made speeches, indeed, but was called "the 
Dinner Bell," because the members of Parlia- 
ment scattered themselves instead of listening 
when he rose. Possibly this briefer tenure of 
fame is nature's compensation for the more 
thrilling excitement of the orator's life as com- 
pared with the author's. The poet's eye may 
be in never so fine a frenzy rolling, but he 
enjoys himself alone ; he can never wholly 
trust his own judgment, nor even that of his 
admiring family. A perceptible interval must 
pass before he hears from his public. The 
orator's appreciation, on the other hand, comes 
back as promptly as an answering echo : his 
hearers sometimes hardly wait for his sentence 
to be ended. In this respect he is like the 
actor, and enjoys, like him, a life too exciting 
to be quite wholesome. There are moments 
when every orator speaks, as we may say, above 
himself. Either he waked that morning fresher 
and more vigorous than usual, or he has had 
good news, or the audience is particularly sym- 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 357 

pathetic ; at any rate, he surprises himself by 
going beyond his accustomed range. Or it may 
be, on the other hand, that he has heard bad 
news, or the audience is particularly antago- 
nistic, so that he gets the warmth by reaction, 
as from a cold bath. When Wendell Phillips was 
speaking more tamely than usual, the younger 
Abolitionists would sometimes go round behind 
the audience and start a hiss, which roused 
him without fail. The most experienced public 
speaker can never fully allow for these varia- 
tions, or foretell with precision what his suc- 
cess is to be. No doubt there may be for all 
grades of intellect something akin to inspira- 
tion, when it is the ardor of the blood which 
speaks, and the orator himself seems merely to 
listen. Probably a scolding fishwoman has her 
days of glory when she is in remarkably good 
form, and looks back afterward in astonishment 
at her own flow of language. Whatever sur- 
prises the speaker is almost equally sure to 
arrest the audience ; his prepared material may 
miss its effect, but his impulse rarely does. 
"Indeed," as I wrote elsewhere long ago, "the 
best hope that any orator can have is to rise at 
favored moments to some height of enthusiasm 
that shall make all his previous structure of 
preparation superfluous ; as the ship in launch- 
ing glides from the ways, and scatters cradle- 



358 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

timbers and wedges upon the waters that are 
henceforth to be her home." 

The moral of my whole tale is that while no 
man who is appointed by nature to literary ser- 
vice should forsake it for public life, yet the 
experience of the platform, and even of direct 
political service, will be most valuable to him 
up to a certain point. That neither of these 
avenues leads surely to fame or wealth is a 
wholly secondary matter. Gibbon says of him- 
self that "in circumstances more indigent or 
more wealthy " he " should never have accom- 
plished the task or acquired the fame of an 
historian." For myself, I have always been 
very grateful, first for not being rich, since 
wealth is a condition giving not merely new 
temptations, but new cares and responsibilities, 
such as a student should not be called upon 
to undertake ; and secondly, for having always 
had the health and habits which enabled me to 
earn an honest living by literature, and this 
without actual drudgery. Drudgery in litera- 
ture is not simply to work hard, which is a 
pleasure, but to work on unattractive material. 
If one escapes drudgery, it seems to me that 
he has in literature the most delightful of all 
pursuits, but especially if he can get the added 
variety that comes from having the immediate 
contact with life which occasional public speak- 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 359 

ing gives. The writer obtains from such inter- 
course that which Selden, in his "Table Talk," 
attributes to the habit of dining in public as 
practiced by old English sovereigns : " The 
King himself used to eat in the hall, and his 
lords with him, and then he understood men." 
It is, after all, the orator, not the writer, who 
meets men literally face to face; beyond this 
their functions are much alike. Of course 
neither of them can expect to win the vast 
prizes of wealth or power which commerce 
sometimes gives ; and one's best preparation is 
to have looked poverty and obscurity in the 
face in youth, to have taken its measure and 
accepted it as a possible alternative, — a thing 
insignificant to a man who has, or even thinks 
he has, a higher aim. 

No single sentence, except a few of Emer- 
son's, ever moved me so much in youth as did 
a passage translated in Mrs. Austen's " Ger- 
man Prose Writers " from Heinzelmann, an 
author of whom I never read another word : 
" Be and continue poor, young man, while 
others around you grow rich by fraud and dis- 
loyalty ; be without place or power, while others 
beg their way upward ; bear the pain of dis- 
appointed hopes, while others gain the accom- 
plishment of theirs by flattery ; forego the gra- 
cious pressure of the hand, for which others 

r 



36o CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

cringe and crawl ; wrap yourself in your own 
virtue, and seek a friend, and your daily bread. 
If you have, in such a course, grown gray with 
unblenched honor, bless God, and die." This 
should be learned by heart by every young 
man ; but he should also temper it with the 
fine saying of Thoreau, that he " did not wish 
to practice self-denial unless it was quite neces- 
sary." In other words, a man should not be an 
ascetic for the sake of asceticism, but he should 
cheerfully accept that attitude if it proves to be 
for him the necessary path to true manhood. 
It is not worth while that he should live, like 
Spinoza, on five cents a day. It is worth while 
that he should be ready to do this, if need- 
ful, rather than to forego his appointed work, 
as Spinoza certainly did not. If I am glad of 
anything, it is that I learned in time, though 
not without some early stumblings, to adjust 
life to its actual conditions, and to find it richly 
worth living. 

After all, no modern writer can state the 
relative position of author and orator, or the 
ultimate aims of each, better than it was done 
eighteen centuries ago in that fine dialogue 
which has been variously attributed to Ouin- 
tilian and Tacitus, in which the representatives 
of the two vocations compare their experience. 
Both agree that the satisfaction of exercising 



OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE 361 

the gift and of knowing its usefulness to others 
provides better rewards than all office, all 
wealth. Aper, the representative orator, says 
that when he is called on to plead for the op- 
pressed or for any good cause, he rises above 
all places of high preferment, and can afford to 
look down on them all. ("Tum mihi supra 
tribunatus et praeturas et consulatus ascendere 
videor.") Maternus, who has retired from the 
public forum to write tragedies, justifies his 
course on the ground that the influence of the 
poet is far more lasting than that of the orator; 
and he is so far from asking wealth as a reward 
that he hopes to leave behind him, when he 
shall come to die, only so much of worldly pos- 
sessions as may provide parting gifts for a few 
friends. (" Nee plus habeam quam quod pos- 
sim cui velim relinquere. ") If ancient Rome 
furnished this lofty standard, cannot modern 
Christendom hope at least to match it ? 



EPILOGUE 

In reading reminiscences like those contained 
in this volume, the public may often justly 
complain that too much has been told. The 
writer, on the other hand, when he comes to 
review what he has written, may be more justly 
amazed to see how large a portion of what is to 
him most important has remained unmentioned. 
Unless he has by nature the oppressive com- 
municativeness of a French or Italian autobio- 
grapher, he will probably have left unchroni- 
cled the most intimate and essential parts of 
his own existence, — love, friendship, home, so- 
ciety, health, — while only that which is more 
overt and tangible remains in view. The frank- 
est writer doubtless leaves untold more of the 
story of his life than he tells. For the rest, 
his career, be it larger or smaller, belongs to 
his own time ; and its record is chiefly valuable 
for the light it throws on the period and the 
place. 

It must be borne in mind that one who has 
habitually occupied the attitude of a reformer 
must inevitably have some satisfactions, at the 



EPILOGUE 363 

latter end of life, which those who are con- 
servative by temperament can hardly share. 
To the latter, things commonly seem to be 
changing for the worse, and this habit of mind 
must be a dreary companion as the years ad- 
vance. The reformer, on the other hand, sees 
so much already accomplished, in the direction 
of his desires, that he can await in some security 
the fulfillment of the rest. Personally I should 
like to live to see international arbitration se- 
cured, civil service reform completed, free trade 
established ; to find the legal and educational 
rights of the two sexes equalized ; to know that 
all cities are as honestly governed as that in 
which I dwell ; to see natural monopolies owned 
by the public, not in private hands ; to see 
drunkenness extirpated ; to live under absolute 
as well as nominal religious freedom ; to per- 
ceive American literature to be thoroughly 
emancipated from that habit of colonial defer- 
ence which still hampers it. Yet it is some- 
thing to believe it possible that, after the 
progress already made on the whole in these 
several directions, some future generation may 
see the fulfillment of what remains. 

To those who were living when the American 
nation lifted and threw off from its shoulders 
the vast incubus of human slavery, what other 
task can seem too great to be accomplished ? 



364 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS 

In the presence of such a step in human pro- 
gress as this, how trivial and unimportant are 
all personal ambitions ! The high-water mark 
of earthly endeavor is not to be found in the 
pure love of science or art or literature, since 
these do not, at their utmost, include all the 
interests of man ; nor in the wish to establish 
the glory of God, which needs no establishing; 
but it lies in aims so far-reaching that they 
exclude all petty personalities — in aims such 
as are expressed in George Eliot's " choir invis- 
ible," or in the sublime prayer of the French 
iconoclast, Proudhon, " Let my memory perish, 
if only humanity may be free." 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abbott, J. G., 128. 

Abolitionists, the, 139. 

About, Edmond, 313. 

Adam, 139, 180. 

Adams, C. F., 21, 52, 53, 137. 

Adams, Hannah, 6. 

Agassiz, Alexander, 283. 

" Albion, The," 189. 

Alcott, A. B., 117, 147, 158, 169, 173, 
175, iSi, 191. 

Alexander the Great, 126. 

Alford, Henry, loi. 

Alger, W. R., 105. 

AUston, Washington, 45. 

American Reforms, largely of secu- 
lar origin, 1 16. 

Anderson, Mary, 287. 

Andrew, J. A., 106, 243, 246, 247, 
248. 

Andrews and Stoddard, 21. 

Andrews, Jane, 129. 

Andromeda, 89. 

Aper, a Roman orator, 361. 

Aristophanes, 301. 

Arnold, Matthew, 272, 282, 283. 

Aspinwall, Augustus, 125. 

Atchison, D. R., 213. 

Athletic exercises, influence of, 59. 

Atlantic Circle of Authors, the, 168, 
187. 

Atlantic Club, the, 172, 176. 

Austin, Mrs. Sarah, 359. 

Autobiography, Obstacles to, i. 

Autolycus, in " Winter's Tale," 
quoted, 64. 

Avis, John, 234. 

Bachi, Pietro, 17, S5- 
Bacon, Sir Francis, 58. 
Baker, Lovell, 164. 
Baldwin, J. S., 248. 
Bancroft, Aaron, 15. 
Bancroft, George, i8g. 
Bancroft, Mrs. George, 28», 
Banks, N. P., 237. 
Barnard, Henry, 9. 
Bartlett, Robert, 167, 190. 



Bartol, C. A., 175. 

Batchelder, Mr., 154, 155, 156, 157. 

Batchelder, Mrs. F. L., 4. 

Bearse, Andrew, 144, 148, 165. 

Beatrice, 76. 

Beck, Charles, 54. 

Bede, Adam, 219. 

Beethoven, Ludwig von, 18, 95. 

Belot, Adolphe, 313. 

Belton, W. S., 138. 

Bem, Joseph, 86. 

Bemis, George, 175. 

Besant, Sir Walter, 273. 

Bewick, John, 15. 

Bigelow, Luther, 251. 

Billings, Josh, 284. 

Bird, F. W., 237. 

Birth of a Literature, The, 

167-195. 
Bishop, W. H., 312, 314. 
Blackstone, Sir William, 88. 
Blake, Harrison, 181. 
Blanc, Charles, 322. 
Blanc, Louis, 304, 305, 309, 316, 317, 

318, 320, 321, 322. 
Boarding-schools, Dangers of, 22. 
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 77. 
Borel, General, 307. 
Boswell, James, 15. 
Bowditch, H. L, 176. 
Bowditch, Nathaniel, 50. 
Bowen, Francis, 53, 54. 
Boyesen, H. H., 314. 
Bremer, Fredrika, 101. 
Brentano, Bettine, 25, 92, 93. 
Briggs, the Misses, 119. 
Bright, John, 327. 
Brook Farm, 83, 84, 120. 
Brookline, Mass., summer life in, 

81. 
Brown, Annie, 227. 
Brown, Brownlee, 169. 
Brown, C. B., 58. 
Brown, John, 155, 196-234, 240, 242, 

243, 246, 327. 
Brown, Mrs. John, 227, 230. 
Brown, Madox, 289. 



368 



INDEX 



Brown, Theophilus, i8i. 
Browning, Robert, 66, 67, 202, 235, 

272, 286. 
Brownson, Orestes, 97. 
Bryce, James, 97. 
Bull, Ole, 103. 
Burke, Edmund, 109, 356. 
Burleigh, C. C, 327. 
Burleigh, Charles, 118. 
Burlingame, Anson, 175. 
Burney, Fanny, 15. 
Burns, Anthony, 131, 157, 159, 162, 

165, i66. 
Burns, Robert, 276. 
Butler, B. F., 337, 342. 
Butman, A. O., 162, 163, 164, 165. 
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 15, 23. 

Cabot, Edward, g. 

Cabot, George, 10. 

Cabot, J. E., 105. 

Cambridge Boyhood, A., 1-37. 

Cambridge Churchyard, the, 32. 

Cameron, Mr., 295. 

Cameron, Mrs. J. M., 2S4, 295, 296. 

Campbell, Thomas, 15. 

Canning, George, 23. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 77, 272, 278, 279, 

280, 285, 296, 304, 332. 
Carpenter, Mr., 233. 
Carter, Charles P., 232. 
Carter family, the, 75. 
Cary, Alice, 134. 
Cary, Phoebe, 134. 
Cayley, Mr., 289. 
Channing, Barbara, 83, 84. 
Channing, E. T., 49, 52, 53, 57. 
Channing, Ellery, 169, 174. 
Channing, W. F., 159, 160, 176. 
Channing, W. H., 43, 44, 97. '02> 

114, 120, 175, 327. 
Chapman, George, 95. 
Chapman, J. J., 190. 
Charles River, the, 96. 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 92. 
Cheney, John, 176. 
Child of the College, A, 38-68. 
Child, F. J., 52, S3, 336. 
Child, Mrs. Lydia Maria, 77, 102, 

126. 
Choules, J. O., 175. 
Christ, Jesus, iiS. 
Church of the Disciples, the, 97. 
Cicero, 171. 
Cinderella, 253. 
Civil War, The, 235-270. 
Clapp, Henry, 85. 
Claretie, Jules, 313. 
Clarke, Edward, 62. 
Clarke, J. F., 86, 97, 98, 244- 



Clarkson, Thomas, 327. 

Clay, Henry, 136. 

Clemens, S. L. (Mark Twain), 284. 

Cleveland, Grover, 350, 351. 

Cobb, Governor, 214. 

Cobden, Richard, 327. 

Cockburn, Lord Chief Justice, 281. 

Cogswell, J. G. , 189. 

Coleridge, S. T., 102, 104, 272. 

Collins, J. A., 85. 

Collins, William, 15. 

" Colombo's Birthday " (Browning), 

202. 
Columbus, Christopher, 308. 
Come-outers, the, 114. 
Comte, Auguste, loi. 
Confucius, 2. 
Constant, Benjamin, 86. 
Conway, M. D., 304, 309. 
Conway, Mrs. M. D., 304. 
Cooper, J. F., 41, 170, 187. 
Copley, J. S., 79. 
Courier, P. L., 80. 
Cousin, Victor, 86, loi. 
Craft, Ellen, 328. 
Cranch, C. P., 18. 
Crosby, Alpheus, 130. 
Cudworth, Ralph, 101. 
Curtin, Governor, 246. 
Curtis, Burrill, 78, 83, 85. 
Curtis, G. W., 78, 83, 84, 98. 
Curtis, Mary (Story), 22. 
Gushing, Caleb, 127. 
Cutter, Calvin, 197. 
Cuvier, Baron G. C. L. D. de, 251, 

272. 

Dana, C. A., 83, 84, loi. 

Dana, R. H., 21, 53, 136, 137, 161. 

Dante degli Alighieri, 76, loi, 289. 

D'Arc, Jeanne, 301, 309. 

D'Arlon, 29. 

Darmesteter, Madame, 289. 

Darwin, Charles, 194, 272, 283, 284, 

285, 2S6, 292, 296. 
Darwin, Mrs. Charles, 284. 
Davis, C. H., 19. 
Davis, Helen, 18. 
Davis, Margaret, 37. 
Demosthenes, 298. 
De Quincey, Thomas, 102. 
Deschanel, Emile, 301, 303. 
Devens, Charles, 48, 74, 141, 247. 
Devens, Mary, 74. 
De Vere, Aubrey, 272. 
" Dial, The," 114. 
Dicey, Albert, 97. 
Dickens, Charles, 187, 234. 
Discharged convict, reform of, 191. 
Dix, Dorothea L., 264. 



INDEX 



369 



Dobson, Susanna, 15. 

Dombey, Paul, 1S7. 

Douglas, S. A., 239. 

Douglass, Frederick, 127, 173, 327. 

Downes, Commodore, 142. 

Doy, Doctor, 233. 

Drew, Thomas, 156, 163. 

Du Maurier, George, 289. 

Durant, H. F., 63, 88. 

Dwight, John, iS. 

Edgeworth, Maria, 15. 

" Eleanore," Tennyson's, 296. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 7. 

Ellis, A. J., 284. 

Ellis, C. M., 142. 

Emerson, R. W., 23, 36, 53, 67, 69, 
77) 87, 91, 92, 95, 100, III, 115, 
118, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 
176, 180, 182, 185, 190, 204, 244, 
272, 279, 297, 327, 331, 332, 341, 

^359- 

Emigrant Aid Society, The, 196. 

Epictetus, 270. 

Epilogue, 362-364. 

Erckmann-Chatrian, 320. 

" Estray, The," 102. 

Everett, Edward, 12, 79, 189. 

Everett, Mrs. Edward, 12. 

Fallersleben, HofFmann von, loi. 

Falstafi, quoted, 174. 

Farlow, W. G., 59. 

Farrar, Mrs. John, 90. 

Faust, 244. 

Fay, Maria, 34, 74, 75. 

Fay, S. P. P., 75- 

Fayal, Voyage from, 196. 

Felton, C. C, 53, 54. 

Fichte, J. G., 102. 

Fields, J. T., 176, 183, 184, 185, 186, 

187, 292. 
Fillmore, Millard, 136. 
Finnegan, General, 262. 
Fiske, John, 58, 59. 
Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, 66. 
Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun, 183. 
Follen, Charles, 16. 
Forbes, Hugh, 220, 211, 222. 
Foster, Abby Kelley, 146. 
Foster, Dwight, 83. 
Foster, S. S., n6, 146, 327. 
Fourier, Charles, loi. 
Francis, Convers, 100, 101. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 16. 
Free Church of Worcester, 146. 
Freeman, Watson, 155. 
Freiligrath, Ferdinand, loi. 
French, J. H., 245. 
Frithiof's Saga, 10 1. 



Frothingham, O. B., 44, 105, 106, 

J7S- 
Froude, J. A., 272, 277, 278, 279. 
Froude, Mrs. J. A., 277. 
Fugitive Slave Epoch, The, 132- 

166. 
Fugitive Slave Law, Passage of, 133- 
Fuller, Margaret, 12, 77, 91, 92. 

Gardner, Joseph, 233. 
Garfield, J. A., 349. 
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 220. 
Garrison, W. L., 97, 116, 125, 126, 

127. ;35i i39> 242, 327. 
Gasparin, Madame de, 266. 
Geary, J. W., 203, 205, 206. 
German influence on American 

thought, 188. 
Gibbon, Edward, 91, 358. 
Giles, Henry, 175. 
Gillmore, Q. A., 262. 
Goethe, J. F. W. von, 15, 42, 194, 

348. 
Goodell, John, 251. 
Goodhue, J. M., 247. 
Gosse, Edmund, 289. 
Graeme, Christie, 233. 
Grandison, Sir Charles, ij. 
Green, J. H., 102. 
Greene, W. B., 107, 175. 
Grenville, Tom, 166. 
Grimes, Mr., 143. 
Giinderode, Caroline von, 92, 93. 

Habersham, W. N., 18. 

Haggard, Rider, 273. 

Hale, E. E., 53, 17s, 193, 194. 

Hale family, the, 75. 

Hall, A. O., 108. 

Hall, Fitzedward, 53. 

Hamel, M., 321. 

Hanway, James, 208. 

" Harbinger, The," loi. 

Hardy, Thomas, 273, 352. 

Harrington, Mrs., 86. 

Harris, T.W., 56. 

Harvard University in 1837, 44 i ini- 
provements in morals and man- 
ners, 46 ; elective system at, 57. 

Haven, Franklin, 176. 

Hawkins, N., 217. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 12, 158, 168, 
170, 171, 176, 297, 315. 

Hay, George, 55. 

Hay, John, 219. 

Hayden, Lewis, 140, 151, 155, 245. 

Hazlett, Albert, 229, 231. 

Hazlitt, William, 67. 

Hedge, F. H., 53, 175. 

Heine, Heinrich^ 80, go, 120. 



370 



INDEX 



Heinzelmann, :isg. 

" Heraud's Monthly Magazine," 
quoted, 167. 

Herttell, Thomas, 116. 

Hesiod, 92. 

Higginson, Barbara, 80. 

Higginson, F. J., 123. 

Higginson, Francis, 4, 114, 130. 

Higginson, John, 123. 

Higginson, Louisa (Storrow), 8, 10, 
34, 160. 

Higginson, Louisa Susan, loi. 

Higginson, Stephen, senior, 4; de- 
scription of, by W. H. Channing, 

Higginson, Stephen, junior, 4. 

Higginson, T. W., birth and home, 
3; school days, 19; college life, 
42 ; residence at Brookline, 81 ; 
favorite reading, 92, 102; love of 
natural history, 24, 194; first pub- 
lications, loi, 102; post-collegiate 
study, 90; residence at Newbury- 
port, 112, 127; interest in Wo- 
man's Rights, 120; early anti-sla- 
very influences, 126 ; residence at 
Worcester, 130, 146; fugitive slave 
events, 139 ; speech at Tremont 
Temple, 142 ; editorial writing, 
145; first magazine articles, 172; 
first contribution to " Atlantic 
Monthly," 171 ; perilous versatil- 
ity, 182; "Young Folks' History 
of United States," 1S6 ; love of 
athletic exercises, 194 ; school 
committee work, 193; first book, 
194 ; trip to Fayal, 196 ; visit to 
Kansas, 197 ; meeting with J. H. 
Lane, 203 ; intercourse with John 
Brown, 218; visit to his family, 
226 ; attempt to rescue his confed- 
erates, 231 ; visit to a slave deal- 
er's, 235 ; action during civil war, 
245 ; enlistment, 248 ; transfer to 
South Carolina, 252 ; first military 
expedition, 259; "Army Life in 
a Black Regiment," 266; "Har- 
vard Memorial Biographies," 270; 
" Epictetus," 270; " Malbone " 
and " Oldport Days," 270; resi- 
dence in Newport, 270; visits to 
London, 271 ; to Paris, 298; pub- 
lic speaking, 326 ; public ofiSce, 

•r ?35.- 

Higginson, Waldo, 73. 
Hill, Thomas, 53, 105, 175. 
Hillard, G. S., 53, i7S. 
Hinton, R. H., 215, 231. 
Hoar, E. R., 170, 175. 



Hoar, G. P., 162. 

Hoffman, Wickham, 62. 

Holmes, Abiel, 13. 

Holmes, John, 16, 39, 42. 

Holmes, O. W., 4, 13, 24, 31, 32, 53, 

'39i '54i '68, 171, 176, 177, 178, 

179, 180, 182, 186. 
Homer, 92, loi. 
Hoole, John, 15. 
Hopkins, Louisa (Stone), 129. 
Home, R. H., 112. 
Horsford, E. N., 27. 
Houghton, Lord, 2, 289, 294, 297. 
Houghton, Mr., 34. 
Howard, John, 5. 
Howe, Julia Ward, 311. 
Howe, S. G., 142, 148, 150, 159, 176, 

215, 221, 246. 
Howland, Joseph, 163. 
Hughes, Thomas, 297. 
Hugo, Victor, 298, 300, 301, 302, 303, 

3", 3131 321- 
Humboldt, Baron F. H. A. vou, 

272. 
Hunter, David, 253, 256, 261, 262. 
Huntin, A., 225. 
Hurlbert (originally Hurlbut), W. 

H., 107, 109, no, III. 
Hutchinson, Abby, 118, 119. 
Huxley, T. H., 272, 285. 

Irving, Washington, 12, 170, 187, 

278. 

Jackson, C. T., 157. 
Jackson, J,, 331. 
James, Henry, senior, 175. 
James, Henry, 117. 
Jefferson, Thomas, s, 10. 
Jerrold, Blanchard, 312. 
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 15. 
Johnson, Rev. Samuel, 105, 106. 
Jones, Mr., 334. 
Jones, Mrs., 334. 
Jones, Sammy, 334. 
Jonson, Ben, 3. 
Jouffroy, T. S., 86. 

Kansas and John Brown, 196- 

234- 
Kant, Immanuel, 105. 
Keats, John, 19, 67. 
Keene, Charles, 290. 
Kelley, Abby, 327. 
Kemp, Mr., 148, 151. 
Keppel, Augustus, 166. 
King, Edward, 312. 
King family, the, 75. 
King, Mrs. Rufus, 17. 



INDEX 



37^ 



Kingsley, Charles, 107, 276. 
Kirkland, J. T.,6. 
Kraitsir, Charles, 86, 93. 
Krummacher, F. A., iii, 

Lamartine, A. M. L. de, 309, 310. 
Lamennais, H. F. R., Abbe de, 92, 

93. i6o- 
Lander, F. W., 264. 
Lander, Jean M., Mrs., 264, 265. 
Landor, W. S., 24, loi, 112, 298. 
Lane, G. M., 53. 
Lane, J. H., 203, 204, 207, 208, 219, 

230. 
Lang, Andrew, 273. 
Lanier, Sidney, 230. 
Laplace, Marquis de, 50, 51. 
Lamed, Mr., 83. 
Laura, 76. 

Lazarus, Emma, 314. 
Le Barnes, J. W., 231, 232, 240. 
Lee, Mrs. Thomas, 87. 
Leighton, Caroline (Andrews), 129. 
Leland, C. G., 312, 314. 
Leroux, Pierre, 86. 
Lewes, Mrs. (George Eliot), 219. 
Lincoln, Abraham, 239, 261. 
Linnseus, Charles von, 89, 92. 
Literary London Twenty Years 

Ago, 271-297. 
Literary Paris Twenty Years 

Ago, 298-325. 
Literature and Oratory compared, 

360. 
Locke, John, 70. 
Lodge, H. C, 352. 
Long, J. D., 337, 354. 
Longfellow, H. W., 12, 13, 33, 54, 

S5> (>7t 9S) i°ii i°2, 103, 168, 171, 

176, 178, 179, 180, 189, 313, 314, 

33', 345- 
Longfellow, Samuel, 105. 
Loring, E. G., 141. 
Loring, G. B., 176. 
L'Ouverture, Toussaint, 270. 
Lovering, Joseph, 53, 54. 
Lowell, Charles, 103. 
Lowell, J. R., 24, 28, 37, 42, 53, 55, 

671 70> 73. 76, 77, 93. 94, 9S, 96, 

97i 103. I'o. "8, 126, 128, 168, 

170, 171, 173, 174, 176, 178, 179, 

180, 182, 184, 186, 295. 
Lowell, John, 5. 
Lowell, Maria (White), 67, 75, 76, 

77. loi- 
Lynch, John, 235, 236. 
L3rttelton, Lord, 289. 

Macaulay, T. B., 170. 



Macbeth, 265. 

Mackay, Mr., 202. 

Mackintosh, Sir James, 272. 

Malot, Hector, 313. 

Man of Ross, The, 5. 

Mangual, Pedro, 22. 

Mann, Horace, 142. 

Marcou, M., 321. 

Marshall, John, 15. 

Martin, John, 210. 

Martineau, Harriet, 126. 

Mary, Queen, 35. 

Mason, Charles, 54. 

Matemus, a Roman poet, 361. 

Mather, Cotton, 4. 

Mather, Increase, 53. 

May, S. J., 327. 

May, Samuel, 146, 147. 

Meikeljohn, J. M. D., 105. 

Melusina, 42. 

Mercutio, in " Romeo and Juliet," 

quoted, 263. 
Mill, J. S., lor, 121, 122. 
Millais, J. E., 332. 
Miller, Joaquin, 289. 
Mills, Harriet, 19. 
Minot, Francis, 62. 
Montaigne, Michael de, 181. 
Montgomery, James, 143, 207, 208, 

215, 231, 232, 233, 234, 246. 
Moore, Miles, 213, 214. 
Moore, Thomas, 304. 
Morris, William, 289. 
Morse, Jedediah, 6. 
Morse, Royal, 70. 
Motley, J. L., 53, 74, 169. 
Mott, Lucretia, 327. 
Moulton, Louise Chandler, 289. 
Mucklewrath, Habakkuk, 219. 
Munroe, G. H., 156. 
Music, Influence of, on a child, 18. 

Nemesis of Public Speaking, The, 

355- 
Newton, Mr., 280. 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 92. 
Nicolay, J. G., 219. 
Niebuhr, B. G., 171. 
Nordau, Max, 313. 
North, Christopher, 169. 
Northumberland, Duke of, 282. 
Norton, Andrews, 12. 
Norton, C. E., 39, 53, 336. 

O'Brien, Fitzjames, 42. 
O'Connor, W^. D., 163. 
Oken, Lorenz, 194. 
On the Outskirts of Public 
Life, 326-361. 



372 



INDEX 



O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 289. 
Ossoli, see Fuller. 
Owen, Richard, 194. 

Palfrey, J. G., 12, 100, 103. 

Palmer, Edward, 117. 

Papanti, Lorenzo, 37. 

Parker, F. E., 53, 62, 63, 64. 

Parker, Theodore, 6g, 97, 98, 100, 
III, 112, 113, 130, 144, 148, 150, 
15S1 '59> i6ii 168, 170, 175, 184, 
i8g, 217, 221, 327. 

Parkman, Francis, 169, 183. 

Parsons, Charles, 13, 24, 40. 

Parsons, Theophilus, 122. 

Parton, James, 301, 

Paul, Apostle, 217. 

Peabody, A. P., 5, 53, 63. 

Peabody, Elizabeth, 86, 87, 173. 

Peirce, Benjamin, 17, 49, 50, 51, 52. 

Pericles, 112. 

Period of the Newness, The, 
69-99. 

Perkins, C. C., 20, 66, 124. 

Perkins, H. C, 194. 

Perkins, S. G., 80, 81, 124. 

Perkins, S. H., 79, 80, 83, 84. 

Perkins, T. H., 80. 

Perry, Mrs., sis- 
Peter, Mrs., 17. 

Petrarca, Francisco, 76. 

Philip of Macedon, 126, 131. 

Phillips & Sampson, 176. 

Phillips, W. A., 207. 

Phillips, Wendell, 53, 97, 121, 145, 
148, 149, 150, 159, 240. 242, 243, 
244, 297, 327, 328, 329, 333, 357. 

Pickering, Arthur, 85. 

Pierce, A. L., 125. 

Pierce, John, 45. 

Pike, Mr., 233. 

Pillsbury, Parker, 327. 

Pinckney, C. C, 13. 

Plato, loi, 158, 181. 

Plunkett, Sergeant, 345. 

Plutarch, 15, 57, 171. 

Pollock, Sir Frederick, 280, 281, 
297. 

Pollock, Lady, 280, 292. 

Pope, Alexander, i, 5. 

Pottawatomie Massacre, The, ap- 
proved in Kansas, 207. 

Poverty, compensations of, 339. 

Pratt, Dexter, 12. 

Pratt, Rowena, 12. 

Precocity, perils of, 68. 

Preston, Colonel, 206. 

Prescott, W. H., 82. 

Prohibitory Laws, 120- 



Proudhon, P. J., 364. 
Provincialism, advantages of, for 

children, 3. 
Putnam, Mary Lowell, 173. 
Puttenham, George, 95. 
Pythagoras, 158. 

Quincy, Edmund, 178, 179, 244. 
Quincy, Josiah, 56, 71. 
Quintilian, 360. 

Rabelais, Francis, 181. 

Rainsford, W. S., 98. 

Raynal, W. T. F., 15. 

Redpath, James, 206, 226. 

Rees, Abraham, 31. 

Reformer, the Rearing of a, 

100-131. 
Remond, C. L., 174, 327. 
Retzsch, Moritz, 79. 
Revere, John, 54. 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 79. 
Ribera, Jos^, 295. 
Rice, Mr., 233. 
Rice, W. W., 164. 
Richard, King, 60. 
Richardson, James, 106. 
Richter, J. P., 87, 90. 
Rigual, Magin, 22. 
Ripley, George, 189. 
Ripley, Mrs. Sophia, 84. 
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, 292> 
Ritter, J. W., 92. 
Rivers, Prince, 255. 
Rob Roy, 36, 214. 
Robinson, Charles, 206, 207, 208, 

2og. 
Robinson, Rowland, 115. 
Roelker, Bernard, 55. 
Rogers, Seth, 265. 
Rollins, E. W., 60. 
Roosevelt, Theodore, 345. 
RosellOj Victoriano, 22. 
Rossetti, William, 288. 
Rossetti, Mrs., 289. 
Rousseau, J. J., 316, 317, 318, 320. 
RUckert, Friedrich, loi. 
Rupert, Prince, 203. 
Russell, W. E., 353. 
Russell, Thomas, 226. 
Russell, William, 21. 
Russell, Lord William, 282. 
Rust, J. D., 261, 262. 

Saladin, 60, 301. 
Sales, Francis, 55. 
Saltoun, Fletcher of, 183. 
Sanborn, F. B., 173, 215, 2>7. 218, 
221, 222, 224, 225. 



INDEX 



373 



Sand, George, 77. 

Savage, James, 224. 

Saxton, Rufus, 24S, 251, 252, 253, 

256, 257, 265. 
Schelling, F. W. J., 102. 
Schnetzler, August, Sg. 
Scholar in politics, the, no prejudice 

against, 336. 
Schramm, Herr von, 120. 
Schubert, G. H. von, 86. 
Scott, Sir Walter, 16, 132, 133, 219, 

272, 276. 
Seamans, Mr., 233. 
Sedgwick, Charles, 60. 
Selden, John, 359. 
Sewall, S. E., 175. 
Sewall, Samuel, 122. 
Seward, W. H., 238, 239. 
Shadrach (a slave), 135, 136, 137, 

139, 140, 142. 
Shairp, Principal, 277. 
Shakespeare, William, 64, 287, 294. 
Shaw, R. G., 256. 
Shimmin, C. F., 60. 
Siddons, Mrs., 266. 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 258. 
Sims, Thomas, 131, 142, 143, 144, 

146. 
Sismondi, J. C. L. S. de, 92. 
" Sisterhood of Reforms," the, 119. 
Sivret, Mrs., 251. 
Skimpole, Harold, 117. 
Smalley, G. W., 240, 312. 
Smith, Gerrit, 218. 
Smith, H. W.,64. 
Smith, T. C. H., 62. 
Social feeling in Cambridge, 71. 
Somerville, Mrs., 17. 
Soule, Silas, 233. 
Spanish school-boys, 22. 
Sparks, Jared, 16, 56, 58. 
Spencer, Herbert, 272. 
Spenser, Edmund, 11, 28. 
Spinoza, Benedict, 360. 
Spofford, Harriet (Prescott), 129, 

130, 177, 178, 179. 
Sprague, A. B. R., 250. 
Spring, L. W., 207. 
Spring, Mrs. Rebecca, 230. 
Spuller, M., 300. 
Stackpole, J. L., 74. 
Stallknecht, F. S., 104. 
Steams, G. L., 215, 217, 218, 221, 

222. 
Steedman, Charles, 261. 
Stevens, A. D., 229, 231. 
Stevens, C. E., 157, 158. 
Stewart, Dugald, 11. 
Stillman, Mrs., 296. 



Storrow, Ann (Appleton), 7, 9. 

Storrow, Anne G., 7. 

Storrow, S. E., 74. 

Storrow, Thomas, 7, 8. 

Story, Joseph, 47. 

Story, W. W., 77. 

Story, William, ig, 22, 28. 

Story family, the, 75. 

Stowe, C. E., 139, 178, 179, 180. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 176, 177, 

178, 179, 180, 213. 
Stowell, Martin, 147, 148, 149, 151, 

i53i 156, 157. 19I1 198,215. 
Straub, Mr., 209. 
Straub, Miss, 209. 
Strauss, D. F., loi. 
Stuart, Gilbert, 280. 
Sullivan, J. L., 263. 
Sumner, Charles, 53, 125, 146, 175, 

196, 267. 
Suttle, C. F., 148. 
Swift, J. L., 151. 
Swinburne, A. C, 289. 
Swiveller, Dick, 30. 

Tacitus, C. C, 360. 
Tadema, Alma, 289. 
Talandier, M., 304, 305, 306, 309, 

310. 
Taney, R. B., 238. 
Tappan, S. F., 204, 215. 
Taylor, Bayard, 108, 293. 
Taylor, Henry, 29. 
Taylor, Tom, 312. 
Tennyson, Alfred, 67, 272, 287, 291, 

292, 294, 295, 296, 314. 
Thackeray, W. M., 187, 313. 
Thaxter, Celia, 67. 
Thaxter, L. L., 66, 67, 76, 94. 
Thaxter, Roland, 67. 
Thaxter family, the, 75. 
Thayer and Eldridge, 230. 
Thdr^se, Madame, 320. 
Thomas, C. G., 91. 
Thompson, William, 198. 
Thoreau, Miss, 170. 
Thoreau, H. D., 25, 53, 78, 91, 92, 

114, 169, 170, 181, 279, 360. 
Ticknor, George, 12, 15, 49, i8g. 
Ticknor, W. D., 176. 
Ticknor & Fields, 183. 
Tidd, C. P., 228, 229. 
Todd, Francis, 127. 
Tolstoi, Count Leo, 315. 
Torrey, H. W., 53, 58. 
Tourgueneff (or Turg^nev), I. S., 

313, .314- 
Town and Country Club, the, 172. 
Transcendentalism, 69. 



374 



INDEX 



Transcendentalists, the, 114. 
Trenck, Baron, 23. 
TroUope, Anthony, 287. 
Trowbridge, C. T., 262. 
Tubman, Harriet, 328. 
Tuckerman, Edward, 104. 
Tuckerman family, the, 75. 
Tukey, Marshal, 161. 
Turpin, Richard, 161. 
Tyndall, John, 272, 289. 

Underwood, F. H., 176, 178, 182. 
Ursuline Convent, Burning of the, 

34- 
Usher, R. G., 158. 

Valentine, in "Two Gentlemen of 

Verona," quoted, 271. 
Vanderbilt, Commodore, 173- 
Van der Velde, Willem, 79. 
Van Tromp, Admiral, 103. 
Venable, Mr., 280. 
Very, Jones, 54. 
Village Blacksmith, the, 12. 
Virgil, 337. 

Vigilance Committee, the, 139, 145. 
Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 298, 300, 301, 

302, 303, 3«7) 32I' 

Walker, Captain, 206. 
Walker, F. A., 26. 
Walker, James, 56, no. 
Walpole, Horace, 280. 
Ward, G. C, 176. 
Ward, S. G., 176, 246. 
Ware, George, 25. 
Ware, Henry, 138. 
Ware, Thornton, 29. 
Ware family, the, iSo. 
Washington, George, 16. 
Wasson, D. A., 112, 169. 
Watkins, W. I., 217. 
Watson, Marston, 78. 
Webb, Seth, 157. 
Webster, Daniel, 82, 136, 297. 



Webster, J. W., 27. 

Weiss, John, 103, 169. 

Weld, S. M., 78. 

Weller, Sam, 334. 

Wells, W. H., 129. 

Wells, William, ig, 20,21. 

Wendell, Barrett, 52. 

Wentworth, Amy, 8. 

Weyman, Stanley, 29. 

Whewell, William, 92, loi. 

Whipple, E. P., 170, 176. 

White, A. D., 312. 

White, Blanco, 183. 

White, William, 126. 

White fugitive slaves, 146. 

Whitman, Walt, 230, 231, 289. 

Whittier, J. G., 8, in, 128, 132, 133, 

i34i 135) 168, 171, 178, 179, 180, 

185,237. 
Whittier, Elizabeth, 133, 134. 
Wightman, Mayor, 244. 
Wilberforce, William, 327. 
Wilder, S. V. S., 10. 
Willis, Mr., 233. 
Willis, N. P., 95, 271. 
Wilson, Billy, 231. 
Wimpffen, General, 324. 
Wines, E. C, 310. 
Winkelried, Arnold, 154. 
Winnemucca, Sarah, 87. 
Winthrop, R. C, 53. 
Winthrop, Theodore, 107. 
Wise, H. A., 224, 225. 
Woman's Rights Movement, 120. 
Woman Suffrage, 121. 
Woodward, Rufus, 62. 
Wordsworth, William, 69, 194, 273, 

294, 338- 
Wright, H.C., 113. 
Wyman, J C, 176, 178. 

Xanthus, 112. 

Zaccone, M., 313. 
Zamacois, Eduardo, 295. 



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